Books   Reviewed 


Works  by  the  Same  Author 

POEMS 

POEMS  :  FIRST  SKRiEs  Sg.'nd  Edition 

A  Collection  of  Poems  written  190^-1918 

POEMS  :    SECOND    SERIES 

A  Collection  of  Poems  written  1918-1921, 

THE     BIRDS    AND    OTHER    POEMS  SscOttd    ThoUSaUu 

Poems  written  1918-1919 

THE    SURVIVAL    OF    THE     FITTEST  FoUfth    Edition 

THE    MOON 

Also  in  a  Limited  Autographed  Edition  on  large 
paper 

ESSAYS 

THE    GOLD    TREE    AND    OTHER    STUDIES 

Limited  Autographed  Edition 

LIFE    AND    LETTERS 

BOOKS  IN  GENERAL  :   FIRST  SERIES  Third  Edition 

By  Solomon  Eagle 

BOOKS    IN    GENERAL  \     SECOND    SERIES 
BOOKS    IN    GENERAL  :    THIRD    SERIES 

PARODIES 

COLLECTED  PARODIES  Secoftd  Edition 

IMAGINARY    SPEECHES 
STEPS    TO    PARNASSUS 

TRICKS  OF  THE  TRADE  Seventh  Edition 


THE    COLLECTED     POEMS    OF    JAMES     ELROY    FLECKER  '. 

Edited,  with  an  Introduction 

SELECTIONS    FROM    MODERN    POETS 

The  abolie  are  all  published  by  Hodder  and  Stoughton 
with  the  exception  of  "-Flecker' s  Poems'"  and '^Selec- 
tions from  Modern  Toets  "  [Sec/^^er),  and  "  Steps  to 
Parnassus'''  **  Imaginary  Speeches'''  and  '*  The  Sur- 
vival of  the  Fittest'''  {Allen  and  Univin) 


Books  Reviewed 

Py  J.  C.  Squire 


a 


NEW    XBJr     YORK 
GEORGE  H,  DORAN  COMPANY 

\Printed  in  Great  Britain.^ 


The  Westminster  Press 

411a  Harrow  Road 

London  W  9 


'-^6 


TO 
lOLO    ANEURIN   WILLIAMS 


529^0  1 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

THIS  book  contains  a  selection  from  papers 
on  new  and  old  books  which  have  been  for 
some  time  appearing  weekly  in  the  Observer,  whose 
editor  I  sincerely  thank. 

J.  C.  S. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

John  Clare 

I 

-^liss  Mansfield's  Stories 

9 

A  Book-Collector 

17 

Editing  Shakespeare 

24 

William  James's  Letters 

31 

Baudelaire 

39 

Keats 

46 

Austin  Dobson's  Essays 

55 

Mr.  George  Moore's  Tapestry 

63 

Andrew  Marvell 

70 

A  Dictionary 

79 

Queen  Victoria 

87 

Henley 

95 

A  Critic 

103 

Mr.  Gosse's  Criticisms 

1C9 

The  Art  of  Writing 

116 

A  Metabiological  Pentateuch 

122 

Byron 

129 

Mr.  de  la  Mare's  Romance 

136 

Croce  on  Shakespeare 

144 

The  Poets  and  Childhood 

^52 

The  Classics  in  Translation 

159 

Escapes 

166 

Lord  Rosebery's  Miscellanies 

174 

Minor  Carolines 

181 

Medixval  English  Poetry 

190 

Mark  Akenside 

198 

William  Collins 

207 

Herman  Melville 

214 

Stock  Phrases 

223 

IX 


CONTENTS 

PACK 

The  Laureates 

230 

Letters 

240 

Glands 

246 

A  Supplement  to  Whitman 

252 

The  Elements  of  Poetry 

260 

The  Prospects  of  English 

268 

Delicate  Details 

276 

Christopher  Smart 

284 

JOHN  CLARE 

DURING  the  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth 
centuries  there  was  something  Hke  a  dynasty 
of  poets  whom  critics  specially  commended  to  the 
public  on  the  ground  that  they  were  of  humble, 
particularly  rustic,  origin.  There  was  Stephen  Duck 
the  thresher,  Bloomfield  the  farmer's  boy,  Jones 
the  Derbyshire  butler.  Most  of  these  prodigies 
would  never  have  been  admired  except  as  prodi- 
gies. But  there  was  one  who  was  positively 
handicapped  by  the  manner  in  which  critics  and 
the  public  approached  him.  John  Clare,  *'  the 
Northamptonshire  Peasant,"  a  selection  from  w^hose 
pubUshed  and  unpublished  works  has  now  been 
competently  edited  and  charmingly  printed,  was 
taken  up  and  trumpeted  because  he  could  write 
good  English  and  scannable  hnes  (and  had,  to  boot, 
a  refined  and  even  noble  face),  although  he  had 
spent  his  youth  as  a  farm-labourer.  Men  were 
astonished  to  find  that  he  could  remind  them  of 
Thompson,  Crabbe,  and  Burns  ;  but  they  never  real- 
ised that  he  was  a  better  poet  than  Samuel  Rogers, 
who  in  that  day  was  a  sort  of  pope.  His  first  book 
went  into  four  editions  in  a  year — (it  was  published 
in  1820,  when  he  was  twenty-seven),  but  once  the 
curiosity  had  grown  stale  Clare  was  neglected.  Lord 
Radstock,  who  early  made  himself  Clare's  financial 
godfather,  continued  to  look  after  him  ;  local  land- 
lords, clergymen,  and  doctors  living  near  Helpston 
intermittently  remembered  him  ;  he  was  often  asked 
for  poems  by  second-rate  editors  ;  his  first  publisher 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

( Keats  s  Taylor)  retained  his  interest.  But  long 
before  his  death  in  1864,  after  he  had  spent  twenty- 
seven  years  ir\  asylums,  he  was  almost  forgotten, 
and  although  several  editors  have  since  his  death 
attempted  to  secure  him  justice,  he  has  never  been 
properly  restored  to  public  notice.  Misfortune  pro- 
bably drove  him  mad  (if  he  really  did  go  mad),  and 
it  has  dogged  him  in  death  as  in  life.  ''  The  spirit  of 
fame,"  he  wrote,  **  of  living  a  little  after  life  like  a 
noise  on  a  conspicuous  place,  urges  my  blood  up- 
ward into  unconscious  melodies."  But  the  force  of 
that  impulse  in  him,  the  rare  purity  of  his  poetic 
spirit,  was  never  recognised,  and  interest  in  him 
was  so  sHght  that  until  recently  nobody  cared  to 
know  that  he  had  written  an  enormous  mass  of  un- 
pubhshed  poetry.  After  this  new  edition  {Poems. 
Selected  and  edited  by  Edmund  Blunden  and  Alan 
Porter)  he  will  not  again,  I  think,  be  dismissed  with 
a  line  in  the  histories  and  a  page  in  the  anthologies. 
Clare  was  a  sensitive  man,  and  knew  love,  poverty, 
disappointment,  and  madness.  Inevitably  something 
of  these  experiences  came  into  his  verse.  His  great 
Hnes,  beginning  ''  I  am  ;  yet  what  I  am  none  cares 
or  knows,"  commemorate  his  asylum  years  in  almost 
every  anthology.  During  those  years  he  was  haunted 
by  the  memory  of  an  early  love,  Mary  Joyce,  and 
wrote  about  her  often  and  most  affectionately.  How 
imaginative  are  his  Hnes  on  *'  First  Love  "  : 

And  then  my  blood  rushed  to  my  face 

And  took  m.y  sight  away. 
The  trees  and  bushes  round  the  place 

Seemed  midnight  at  noonday. 


JOHN  CLARE 

In  ''  The  Stranger  "  he  wrote  a  very  powerful  re- 
ligious poem,  forgetting  his  own  sufferings  in  the 
contemplation  of  Christ's.  And  the  remembrance 
of  things  lost,  one  of  the  most  constant  subjects  of 
poetry,  often  moved  him  to  poetry.  Childhood  was 
gone  : 

The  stream  it  is  a  common  stream, 

Where  we  on  Sundays  used  to  ramble, 

The  sky  hangs  o'er  a  broken  dream. 
The  bramble's  dwindled  to  a  bramble. 

At  nearly  forty  he  was  moved  by  a  benevolent  land- 
lord out  of  the  village  in  which  he  had  always  lived, 
and  '*  The  FUtting  "  is  a  very  poignant  expression 
of  his  hankerings  for  a  place  every  corner  of  which 
was  transfigured  in  retrospect.  The  green  lanes  shut 
out  the  hot  sun,  the  brook  had  a  lovely  little  bridge, 
there  were  old  stiles  to  rest  on  : 

And  little  footpaths  sweet  to  see 
Go  seeking  sweeter  places  still. 

Clare  did,  to  some  extent,  write  (in  the  ordinary 
sense  of  the  word)  autobiographically.  But  as  a  rule 
he  did  not  greatly  concern  himself  with  human 
passions,  nor  (except  when  the  pressure  of  circum- 
stance was  especially  acute)  with  his  own  passions, 
save  only  his  dominant  passion  for  his  native  land- 
scape. 

In  the  nature  and  persistence  of  his  love  for,  and 
his  zeal  to  record,  the  commonest  incidents  of  the 
life  of  the  country,  he  closely  resembled  the  late 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Edward  Thomas,  though  his  pictures  were  less  often 
tinged  with  the  melancholy  of  his  mind  than  were 
Thomas's.  His  descriptive  poems  continually  remind 
one  of  the  landscape  painters  of  the  time  :  some- 
times of  the  water  coloiirists,  sometimes  of  Old 
Crome  and  Constable,  but  most  often  of  George 
Morland,  most  rustic  and  most  English  of  painters, 
a  man  who  loved  the  thing  he  saw  anywhere  on  any 
day,  and  was  content  to  show  it  as  it  was.  Lines  like 
those  on  the  cowboy  : 

Whose  sun-burnt  skin  and  cheeks  chuffed  out  with 

fat 
Are  dyed  as  rusty  as  his  napless  hat, 

might  have  been  written  as  inscriptions  for  a  Mor- 
land :  and  whatever  Clare  describes  his  exactitude 
is  the  same.  There  is  not  a  season,  not  a  month,  not 
a  common  bird  or  beast  or  flower  or  bush  or  tree, 
not  a  type  of  building,  not  a  type  of  human  being  in 
the  Midlands  that  he  knew,  which  is  not  faithfully 
sketched  in  his  pages  ;  and  the  wealth  of  his  sub- 
sidiary detail  is  extraordinary.  There  are  things  which 
we  daily  see,  and,  in  an  unformulated  way,  like 
daily,  but  which  we  scarcely  ever  find  mentioned  in 
poetry,  which  is  rather  accustomed  to  select  its 
scenes  and  (too  often)  to  be  content  with  exploiting 
the  acknowledged  beauty  of  forms,  Ughts, and  colours, 
seas,  hills,  and  sunsets,  consecrated  by  many  prece- 
dents. But  with  Clare  we  look  over  a  common  farm- 
yard gate  or  walk  along  an  ordinary  field  path,  fully 
aware  of  all  that  we  see  :  oaks,  hazels,  and  brambles, 
weeds  under  foot,  mud,  grasshoppers,  ants,  snails 


JOHN  CLARE 

on  thorns,  pine-needles,  the  remains  of  a  gipsy  camp, 
barking  dogs,  louts  watching  sheep,  children  picking 
cowsUps  (*'  and,  aye,  the  youngest  ever  lags  behind"), 
ducks  dabbHng  in  ponds,  dogs  sunning  themselves, 
turkeys,  geese,  grunting  hogs,  and  strutting  cocks. 
He  does  not  tumble  his  details  out  without  discrim- 
ination. There  is  always  cunning  in  his  arrangement, 
and  he  has  a  sound  instinct  for  emotional  signifi- 
cance. Take  these  two  brief  examples  from  poems 
on  November  and  another  on  winter  : 

Where  dead  leaves  rustle  sweet  and  give  alarm 
To  little  birds  that  flirt  and  start  away. 

Moody  crows  beside  the  road  forbear 
To  fly,  though  pelted  by  the  passing  swain. 

Each  of  these  phrases  suggest  far  more  than  it  says, 
and  they  are  characteristic  of  him.  But  he  was  largely 
a  poet  of  details,  and  it  is  for  his  details  that  one 
likes  him.  His  best  whole  poems  are  too  long  to 
quote.  But  here  is  one  of  the  short  pieces  discovered 
by  his  present  editors,  ''  The  Stonepit  "  : 

The  passing  traveller  with  wonder  sees 
A  deep  and  ancient  stonepit  full  of  trees  ; 
So  deep  and  very  deep  the  place  has  been, 
The  church  might  stand  within  and  not  be  seen. 
The  passing  stranger  oft  with  wonder  stops 
And  thinks  he  e'en  could  walk  upon  their  tops, 
And  often  stoops  to  see  the  busy  crow. 
And  stands  above  and  sees  the  eggs  below  ; 
And  while  the  wild  horse  gives  its  head  a  toss, 
The  squirrel  dances  up  and  runs  across. 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

The  boy  that  stands  and  kills  the  black-nosed  bee 
Dares  down  as  soon  as  magpies'  nests  are  found, 
And  wonders  when  he  climbs  the  highest  tree 
To  find  it  reaches  scarce  above  the  ground. 

And  how  he  loved  to  complete  his  pictures  may  be 
illustrated  with  two  stanzas  from  his  long  poem  on 
the  spear  thistle  : 

The  sheep  when  hunger  presses  sore 
May  nip  the  clover  round  its  nest  ; 

But  soon  the  thistle  wounding  sore 
Relieves  it  from  each  brushing  guest, 

That  leaves  a  bit  of  wool  behind, 

The  yellow-hammer  loves  to  find. 

The  horse  will  set  his  foot  and  bite 

Close  to  the  ground-lark's  guarded  nest 

And  snort  to  meet  the  prickly  sight  ; 
He  fans  the  feathers  of  her  breast — 

Yet  thistles  prick  so  deep  that  he 

Turns  back  and  leaves  her  dwelling  free. 

Such  a  style,  as  straightforward  and  simple  as  Words- 
worth's at  its  barest,  leads  inevitably  to  occasional 
weakness  of  expression.  You  get  in  Clare  couplets 
such  as  : 

And  all  expected  such  a  rosy  face 
Would  be  her  ruin — as  was  just  the  case. 

But  if  you  like  Clare  you  do  not  mind  that  any  more 
than  if  you  like  Wordsworth  you  mind  the  excess- 
ively plain  statements  of  fact  that  you  sometimes 
find  in  him. 

6 


JOHN  CLARE 

Mr.  Blunden  and  Mr.  Porter  have  begun  their 
work  well.  I  say  ''  begun  "  because  they  will  be  com- 
pelled to  do  more.  They  state  in  their  introduction 
that  they  selected  the  hundred  and  fifty  poems  here 
printed  from  two  thousand  which  they  examined, 
of  which  two  thousand  three-quarters  (I  suppose) 
have  never  been  printed  at  all.  Of  the  ninety  new 
poems  which  they  print,  at  least  forty  are  as  good  as 
any  of  the  old  ones,  and  it  is  to  be  presumed  that 
there  are  many  interesting  ones  amongst  those  which, 
when  making  the  present  small  collection,  they  had 
to  reject.  If  anything,  the  general  level  of  the  new 
poems  is  higher  than  that  of  those  printed  in  Clare's 
four  books.  The  reasons  for  this  are  not  recondite. 
Clare  was  at  his  best  and  most  prolific  in  the  latter 
half  of  his  Hfe  after  he  had  lost  close  touch  with  pub- 
lishers and  editors.  And  it  would  appear  that  those 
who  published  work  by  him  preferred  his  least 
characteristic  work.  The  editors  of  Annuals  between 
1820  and  1840  did  not  want  his  loving  and  most  in- 
dividual transcripts  of  the  EngHsh  landscape.  What 
they  wanted  was  poems  proving  that  ''  the  North- 
amptonshire Peasant  "  could  cherish  sentiments  as 
refined  and  use  abstractions  as  lofty  as  were  enter- 
tained and  employed  by  the  most  highly  educated 
versifiers  of  the  time.  It  is  significant  that  almost  all 
the  best  of  the  Poems  are  of  the  sort  quoted  above, 
poems  which  Clare  could  have  written  but  which 
neither  Tom  Moore  nor  Rogers  could  ever  have 
dreamed  of.  There  are,  I  take  it,  more  of  these  among 
the  two  thousand  ;  but  I  believe  the  two  thousand 
are  not  all.  I  have  heard  that  just  as  Mr.  Blunden 
and  his  colleague  were  pluming  themselves  at  having 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

finished  their  laborious  survey  of  the  ground  they 
were  surprised  (I  dare  not  say  horrified)  to  learn 
that  a  huge  new  hoard  of  Clare  manuscripts,  poems, 
diaries,  and  letters,  literally  by  the  sack- full,  had 
been  discovered  in  Northamptonshire.  There  is  no 
help  for  it  :  they  must  go  on. 

We  must  keep  our  sense  of  proportion.  We  have 
enough  of  Clare's  work  to  be  certain  that  we  shall 
never  think  him  a  great  poet.  Even  a  '*  final  "  edition 
of  him  must  be  a  selection.  Clare  was  not  a  Keats  or 
a  Shelley  that  his  feeblest  fragments  must  be  scoured 
for  and  perpetuated ;  an  edition  of  him  in  ten  volumes 
would  be  a  monument  not  to  his  genius  but  to  an  ad- 
mirer's folly.  But  he  was  a  far  better  poet  than  has 
ever  been  realised  ;  he  had  talents  peculiar  to  him- 
self ;  his  best  work  is  worth  looking  for  indus- 
triously ;  and  his  character  and  career  were  suffi- 
ciently remarkable  to  justify  a  biography  far  more 
considerable  than  anything  which  has  yet  been  done, 
A  large  volume  of  intelligently-chosen  poems  and  a 
companion  volume  of  life  and  letters  would  justify 
themselves,  and  would  leave  him  securely  estab- 
lished among  the  secondary  English  poets. 


MISS  MANSFIELD'S  STORIES 

BOOKS  of  short  stories  are  now  rare  ;  books 
of  short  stories  in  which  one  can  be  at  all 
interested  are  exceedingly  rare.  It  is  about  ten  years 
since  Mr.  Wells,  collecting  the  stories  of  his  lamented 
youth,  commented  on  the  fact  that  the  short  story 
had  declined.  In  the  nineties,  when  he  began  writing, 
all  the  most  eminent,  and  all  the  most  potentially 
eminent  of  English  prose-writers  were  energetically 
writing  short  stories.  Some  of  them  may  have  been 
writing  to  a  formula.  Others,  like  Mr.  Wells,  recog- 
nised no  definition,  but  were  content  to  set  down  as 
'*  jolly  "  and  ''  vivid  "  a  record  of  occurrences  as 
they  could.  ''  It  may,"  he  said,  ''  be  horrible  or 
pathetic,  or  funny  or  beautiful,  or  profoundly  illumi- 
nating, having  only  this  essential,  that  it  should  take 
from  fifteen  to  fifty  minutes  to  read."  But  when  Mr. 
Wells  wrote  the  preface  to  his  collection,  the  serious 
short  story  had  almost  disappeared,  and  (except  for 
the  imported  O.  Henry)  we  have  had  little  of  any 
interest  since.  The  magazine  writers  have  continued 
to  turn  out  stories  for  their  public  ;  the  refined 
authors  have  pubHshed  volumes  of  short  pieces 
difficult  to  write  and  difficult  to  read  ;  but  nothing 
has  been  published  which  has  had  more  than  an 
ephemeral  reputation,  and  few  things  which  have 
had  even  that.  Stevenson  and  Henry  James  are 
dead  ;  the  authors  of  "  The  Man  Who  Came  Back  " 
and  *'  The  Secret  Sharer  "  seem  to  have  exhausted 
their  veins  in  this  kind  ;  and  the  Httle  masterpieces 
of  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  refuse  to  be  labelled  under 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

any  category,  or  to  be  used  as  illustrations  of  any 
general  tendency.  When  a  respectable  writer  does 
publish  a  volume  of  what  look  like  short  stories  the 
chances  are  that  he  calls  them  "  studies,"  and  that 
the  reader  who  does  not  regard  art  as  the  best  means 
of  producing  a  headache  will  find  them  intolerably 
tedious. 

Miss  Mansfield's  collection.  Bliss,  boldly  labelled 
*'  stories,"  is,  therefore,  remarkable  for  not  being 
tedious.  It  is  far  from  tedious.  She  has  so  penetrating 
a  mind  and  such  a  talent  for  expression  that  she 
would  be  interesting  whatever  form  she  were  using 
and  whatever  subject  she  were  writing  about.  It  is 
not  that  she  has  a  markedly  personal  view  of  things, 
a  passionate  or  a  philosophical  attitude  ;  she  is  re- 
strained, and  leaves  her  affections  and  her  admira- 
tions too  much  to  be  guessed  and  deduced.  It  is  not 
that  she  has  a  rich  prose  style  ;  she  checks  the  natural 
music  in  herself,  and  contents  herself  with  a  perpetual 
stream  of  exact  statements  as  terse  as  she  can  make 
them.  Every  word  counts  to  the  inteUigence  and  the 
eye,  but  none  to  the  ear.  But  the  fabric  of  her  writing 
has  no  weak  or  dull  places.  She  beats  all  the  writers 
of  dyspeptic  *'  economical  "  "  reaUstic  "  ''  studies  " 
on  their  own  ground.  Every  story  is  a  tissue  of 
accurate  observations  accurately  expressed.  Miss 
Mansfield  has  an  extraordinary  visual,  and,  if  one 
may  say  so,  olfactory,  memory  ;  her  stories  may 
vary  in  reality,  but  her  material  settings — in  which 
one  includes  everything  from  vegetation  to  the 
human  garment  of  flesh — never.  Almost  every  page 
contains  minor  felicities  which  a  man  with  the 
pencilling  habit  would  be  inclined  to  mark. 

10 


MISS  MANSFIELD'S  STORIES 

The  first  few  pages  are  crowded  with  them.  Kezia, 
left  behind  for  a  few  hours  in  the  house  from  which 
her  family  have  moved,  "  sat  down  on  one  of  the 
box  borders.  By  pressing  hard  at  first  it  made  a  nice 
seat.  But  how  dusty  it  was  inside  !  Kezia  bent  down 
to  look  and  sneezed  and  rubbed  her  nose."  Soon 
afterwards  she  is  having  tea  with  unkind  and  alien 
children  : 

But  Kezia  bit  a  big  piece  out  of  her  bread  and 
dripping,  and  then  stood  the  piece  up  on  her 
plate.  With  the  bite  out  it  made  a  dear  little  sort 
of  gate.  Pooh  !  She  didn't  care  !  A  tear  rolled  down 
her  cheek,  but  she  wasn't  crying.  She  couldn't 
have  cried  in  front  of  those  awful  Samuel  Josephs. 
She  sat  with  her  head  bent,  and  as  the  tear  dripped 
slowly  down  she  caught  it  with  a  neat  little  whisk 
of  her  tongue  and  ate  it  before  any  of  them  had 
seen. 

Later,  she  wanders  over  the  deserted  house.  She 
finds  "  a  pill-box,  black  and  shiny  outside  and  red 
in,  holding  a  blob  of  cotton  wool."  ''  In  the  servant- 
girl's  room  there  was  a  stay-button  stuck  in  a  crack 
of  the  floor,  and  in  another  crack  some  beads  and  a 
needle."  She  went  downstairs  and  looked  at  the 
garden  through  a  coloured  glass  door  *'  at  a  blue 
lawn  with  blue  arum  lilies  growing  at  a  gate,  and 
then  at  a  yellow  lawn  with  yellow  lilies  and  a  yellow 
fence."  Beryl  Fairfield,  after  cHmbing  the  chair  in 
the  kitchen,  comes  down  w^ith  :  "  Have  I  got  a 
spider's  web  on  my  face,  mother  ?  I've  been  poking 
into  that  cupboard  under  the  stairs  and  now  some- 
thing  keeps    tickling   my    nose."    Raoul    Duquette 

II 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

makes  use  of  **  a  morsel  of  pink  blotting-paper,  in- 
credibly soft,  limp,  and  almost  moist,  like  the  tongue 
of  a  little  dead  kitten."  Robert  Salesby,  imagining 
snow  in  London,  saw  the  houses  in  front  with  "  their 
window-boxes  full  of  great  sprays  of  white  coral." 

Miss  Mansfield  can  bring  before  one's  eyes  any 
Invisible  object,  from  the  perspiration  marks  on  a 
i  maid's  bodice  to  the  summer  lightning  fluttering 
■ "  like  a  broken  bird  that  tries  to  fly  and  sinks  again 
and  again  struggles."  And  the  accuracy  and  sim- 
plicity of  her  statement  extends  beyond  this  to  what- 
ever non-material  state  she  may  wish  to  describe. 
She  continually  delights  with  images  such  as  that 
in  which  she  sets  down  the  silence  between  bachelor 
friend  and  spinster  friend  over  teacup  and  fire  in 
"  Psychology  "  :  "  That  silence  could  be  contained 
in  the  circle  of  warm,  deUghtful  fire  and  lamplight. 
How  many  times  hadn't  they  flung  something  into 
it  just  for  the  fun  of  watching  the  ripples  break  on 
the  easy  shores  ?  "  and  that  in  which  she  shows  a 
woman's  dreams  reawaking  when  she  meets  the 
exasperating,  but  much  travelled,  man  to  whom  she 
had  been  engaged  six  years  before  :  "As  he  spoke, 
so  lightly,  tapping  the  end  of  his  cigarette  against 
the  ashtray,  she  felt  the  strange  beast  that  had 
slumbered  so  long  within  her  bosom  stir,  stretch 
itself,  yawn,  prick  up  its  ears,  and  suddenly  bound 
to  its  feet,  and  fix  its  longing,  hungry  stare  upon 
those  far-away  places.  But  all  she  said  was,  smiHng 
gently,  *  How  I  envy  you  !  '  "  How  satisfying  the 
descriptions  of  mind  and  of  matter  are  blended 
might  be  illustrated  from  any  of  these  stories.  One 
may  take  a  few  sentences  from  the  picture  of  Beryl 

12 


MISS  MANSFIELD'S  STORIES 

Fairfield,    an    Anglo-Saxon — happily    very   Anglo- 
Saxon — Madame,  or  Mademoiselle,  Bovary  : 

In  the  dining-room,  by  the  flicker  of  a  wood 
fire.  Beryl  sat  on  a  hassock  playing  the  guitar.  She 
had  bathed  and  changed  all  her  clothes.  Now 
she  wore  a  white  muslin  dress  with  black  spots 
on  it,  and  in  her  hair  she  had  pinned  a  black  silk 
rose 

She  played  and  sang  half  to  herself,  for  she  was 
watching  herself  playing  and  singing.  The  fire- 
light gleamed  on  her  shoes,  on  the  ruddy  belly 
of  the  guitar,  and  on  her  white  fingers.  .  .  . 

''  If  I  were  outside  the  window  and  looked  in 
and  saw  myself  I  really  would  be  rather  struck," 
thought  she.  Still  more  softly  she  played  the 
accompaniment — not  singing  now  but  listening. 

.  .  .  '*  The  first  time  that  I  ever  saw  you,  little 
girl — oh,  you  had  no  idea  that  you  were  not  alone 
— you  were  sitting  with  your  little  feet  upon  a 
hassock,  playing  the  guitar.  God,  I  can  never 
forget.  ..."  Beryl  flung  up  her  head  and  began 
to  sing  again  : 

'*  Even  the  moon  is  aweary  ..." 

But  there  came  a  loud  bang  at  the  door.  The 
servant  girl's  crimson  face  popped  through. 

'*  Please,  Miss  Beryl,  I've  got  to  come  and  lay." 

"  Certainly,  Alice,"  said  Beryl,  in  a  voice  of 
ice.  She  put  the  guitar  in  a  corner.  Alice  lunged 
in  with  a  heavy  black  iron  tray. 

'*  Well,  I  have  had  a  job  with  that  oving,"  said 
she,  "  I  can't  get  nothing  to  brown." 

This  scene  Hngers  in  the  memory.  And  there  are 

13 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

others  which  will  do  that  ;  gardens,  rooms  full  or 
empty,  firelit  and  glittering  with  candles  and  silver, 
an  oily  singer  at  his  piano,  a  decayed  actress  getting 
out  of  bed,  groups  of  wondering  helpless  children, 
a  Paris  street,  a  train  rattling  a  little  frightened 
governess  through  the  night.  The  trouble  is  that, 
generally  speaking,  one  remembers  little  more  than 
pictures,  large  or  small.  One  has  looked  at  a  series 
of  these.  They  have  dawned  on  the  darkness,  grown 
bright,  and  quietly  faded.  But  very  seldom  has  one 
been  moved.  Very  seldom  has  one  felt  the  faintest 
impulse  to  laugh,  cheer,  or  cry.  Why  ?  The  people 
are  not  quite  real  enough  and  not  quite  enough 
happens  to  them. 

It  isn't  that  Miss  Mansfield  is  naturally  a  mere 
quiet  note-taker,  or  that  she  belongs  temperamentally 
to  that  depressing  class  of  people  who  think  they 
have  done  the  finest  thing  in  the  world  when  they 
have  described  several  articles  of  furniture  and  ex- 
hibited a  phantom  '*  he  "  or  "  she  "  incapably  yearn- 
ing, frustrate,  or  disillusioned.  **  Sun  and  Moon  *' 
is  a  delicious,  a  pathetic,  and  beautiful  story,  which 
might  have  resulted  from  a  collaboration  of  Tchekov 
and  Hans  Andersen.  In  "  The  Man  Without  a 
Temperament  "  her  detail  is  at  its  best,  and  she 
uses  the  most  inconspicuous  "  events  "  to  produce 
a  beautiful  and  exalting  impression.  Generally,  how- 
ever, interested  as  one  is,  one  doesn't  much  care 
what  happens,  and  very  little  does  happen.  In  the 
first  long  story,  very  remarkable  as  a  series  of 
photographs,  the  people  are,  except  at  moments, 
seen  clear  but  out  of  contact  with  us,  through  a 
glass.  We  leave  them  where  they  started.  Either 

H 


MISS  MANSFIELD'S  STORIES 

this  was  meant  to  be  the  beginning  of  a  novel,  or 
else  the  author  was  under  the  influence  of  the  theory 
that  it  is  cheap  and  vulgar  to  let  anything  happen 
in  a  narrative.  Sometimes  she  seems  to  remember 
the  other  theory  that  if  anything  does  happen  it 
ought  to  be  unpleasant.  The  conclusions  of  ''  Bliss" 
and  ''  The  Little  Governess  "  are  illustrations  of 
that.  It  is  not  that  the  episodes  are  in  themselves 
unlikely  or  uncommon.  Girls  often  are  assaulted, 
and  husbands  often  are  unfaithful  ;  but  these  stories 
(the  indications  given  of  these  characters)  do  not 
prepare  one  for  the  endings.  Had  Miss  Mansfield 
changed  the  last  page  of  each,  and  prevented  the 
catastrophes,  we  should  never  have  suspected  that 
Harry  was  a  disloyal  husband,  or  the  old  German 
an  old  satyr.  It  is  a  pity  that  ''  BUss  "  thus  fails  to 
come  completely  off.  The  scenes  are  drawn  with 
consummate  precision,  the  wife  is  less  shadowy  than 
usual,  and  there  are  moments  lyriC  in  their  intense 
beauty.  Everjrthing  powders  when  we  have  the  feel- 
ing that  a  realist  is  playing  tricks  with  reality. 

But,  with  all  its  limitations,  this  is  a  book  one  is 
bound  to  respect,  if,  possibly,  one  is  not  certain  to 
re-read  it.  The  author's  powers  have  greatly 
matured  since  she  wrote  her  first  book.  Her  outlook, 
too,  has  modified  :  she  is  no  longer  at  her  best,  and 
most  enthusiastic,  when  writing  of  what  she  hates. 
We  may  hope  that  in  the  future  she  may  be  incHned 
to  write  more  about  the  things  she  loves.  Let  there 
be  calamity,  but  let  us  at  least  be  moved  by  it  ;  it 
is  depressing  to  read  of  miseries  and  never  turn  a 
hair  at  them  because  the  author  has  refused  to 
abandon  herself  in  sympathy.  Let  Miss  Mansfield's 

IS 


( 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

materials  remain  what  they  are.  One  does  not  ask 
her  to  write  of  pirates  or  cowboys,  murders,  bur- 
glaries, or  financial  ramps.  Childhood  and  the 
domestic  interior  are  her  favourite  haunts,  and  her 
imagination  will  always  take  her  back  to  them.  But 
she  can  afford  to  let  herself  go  more,  to  abandon  a 
theoretic  restraint  which  is  foreign  to  her,  to  reflect 
on  the  truth  that  the  literature  which  obtains  and 
keeps  a  hold  on  people  does  not  make  its  principal 
appeal  to  the  recognising  eye  or  even  to  the  under- 
standing. Nobody  ever  said — or  if  he  did  the  com- 
pany must  have  gaped — that  he  found  ''  The  Trojan 
Women  "  or  ''  Pickwick  "  ''  interesting."  And  what 
happens  to  people  who  rely  too  exclusively  on  the 
treatment,  however  masterly,  of  incidental  detail 
may  be  illustrated  from  this  volume.  Three  times  in 
the  course  of  the  book  *'  a  piece  of  iron  banged  " 
meets  the  eye,  and  from  two  several  stories  I  make 
these  two  extracts  : 

...  he  began  to  do  his  exercises.  Deep  breath- 
ing, bending  and  squatting  like  a  frog  and  shoot- 
ing out  his  legs. 

...  he  began  to  do  his  exercises — deep 
breathing,  bending  forward  and  back,  squatting 
like  a  frog  and  shooting  out  his  legs. 

The  better  it  is  done  the  more  one  remembers  it 
and  the  less  effect  it  has  the  second  time. 


i6 


A  BOOK-COLLECTOR 

THERE  was  a  brief  period  when  Dukes  in 
person  used  to  contest  at  Sotheby's  for  early- 
printed  books,  whilst  their  friends  stood  around 
backing  the  respective  staying-powers  of  their  fancies 
as  men  a  little  while  ago  backed  those  of  Car- 
pentier  and  Dempsey.  In  our  time  those  Dukes  who 
have  the  desire  presumably  haven't  the  money. 
Book-collectors  of  a  kind  are  as  numerous  in  England 
as  ever,  but  few  rich  men  are  among  them,  and  nine- 
tenths  of  the  really  expensive  books  that  are  sold  go 
to  America.  There  is  a  class  of  business-man  there 
of  whom  we  have  only  a  few  specimens  here.  They 
are  rich,  they  are  successful  in  Wall  Street  or  the 
stock-yards,  and  they  are  prepared  to  pay  any  price 
for  Corots  or  Caxtons.  Their  motives  are  often  dis- 
cussed by  English  people.  Journalists  frequently 
describe  them  as  men  who,  since  titular  honours  do 
not  exist  in  America  and  dreams  of  an  O.B.E.  can- 
not, therefore,  be  entertained,  find  the  possession 
of  a  unique  collection  of  books  or  pictures  the  best 
way  of  gaining  a  spurious  distinction.  It  is  not  an 
adequate  explanation.  In  1509  an  author  wrote  of 
the  book-collector  : 

Still  am  I  busy  bookes  assemblynge, 
For  to  have  plentie  it  is  a  pleasant  thynge, 
In  my  conceyt,  and  to  have  them  ay  in  hande, 
But  what  they  mene  I  do  not  understande. 

America  then  had  only  just  been  lit  upon,  and  if  we 

17  C 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

ascribe  (as  some  do)  the  American  rage  for  book- 
collecting  to  a  mere  desire  to  have  things  that  other 
people  value,  there  is  an  element  of  that  in  all  collect- 
ing, and  men  who  buy  what  they  do  not  understand 
are  found  everywhere.  There  are  collectors  who 
read  in  America  as  there  are  elsewhere,  and  some 
have  been  scholars.  Perhaps  a  more  nearly  average 
specimen  of  the  class  is  Mr.  Edward  Newton,  who 
has  now  written  a  book.  The  Amenities  of  Book 
Collecting,  and  let  in  a  Httle  light  upon  the  motives 
and  enjoyments  of  some  of  those  Americans  who 
have,  in  a  generation,  put  the  price  of  a  good 
First  Foho  up  to  j£  10,000  and  given  a  new 
value  to  every  scrap  of  paper  written  by  any  man 
of  letters,  dead  or  alive,  who  was  ever  taken  seri- 
ously. 

Mr.  Newton  is  not,  by  modern  American  stan- 
dards, a  collector  of  the  first  rank.  He  is,  or  regards 
himself  as,  a  man  of  modest  means,  who  indulges 
his  hobby  as  far  as  he  is  able.  He  has  no  First  Folio 
and  no  Gutenburg  Bible.  But  if  he  were  rich  enough 
he  would,  he  says,  buy  those  books  at  any  price, 
and  he  complacently  tells  us  (an  American  opinion 
on  the  point  is  worth  noting)  that  for  books  of  this 
kind  "  the  sky  is  the  limit."  All  books  have  risen 
enormously  during  his  lifetime,  and  they  will  all  go 
on  rising.  But,  in  spite  of  his  restricted  means,  he 
has  managed  to  collect  many  remarkable  things 
under  the  noses  of  the  Huntingtons  and  Wideners. 
He  rambles  with  pleasant  garrulity  from  author  to 
author,  and  date  to  date,  making  no  attempt  to  give 
a  systematic  account  of  his  library  ;  but  the  '*  items'* 
he  mentions  by  the  way  are  sufficiently  numerous 

18 


A  BOOK-COLLECTOR 

to  give  an  indication  of  what  it  is  like.  Here  are  some 
of  them — openly  bought  from  the  best  booksellers  : 
a  first  edition  of  Herrick,  Wordsworth's  copy  of 
"  Endymion,"  twenty-one  presentation  copies  of 
Dickens,  early  works  by  Swinburne  and  Hardy,  the 
MS.  of  "  Far  From  the  Madding  Crowd,"  a  holo- 
graph prayer  and  letters  by  Dr.  Johnson,  an  un- 
published work  by  Mrs.  Thrale,  presentation  copies 
of  Stevenson,  Thackeray,  Joseph  Conrad,  Johnson, 
and  Byron  (inscribed  by  Queen  Victoria),  Keats 's 
folio  Spenser,  Rossetti's  drawing  of  Tennyson  read- 
ing '*  Maud  "  to  the  Brownings,  Beardsley's  drawing 
of  Wilde,  first  editions  of  Blake,  Browning's  copy 
of  Coryat,  an  inscribed  copy  of  Wahon's  ''  Lives," 
Congreve's  copy  of  the  first  ''  Robinson  Crusoe," 
a  first  edition  of  ''  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield,"  MS. 
poems  by  Lamb  and  Southey,  fine  copies  of  Surtees 
and  Aiken,  a  copy  of  "  The  Life  of  the  Prince  Con- 
sort," given  by  Queen  Victoria  to  Sir  A.  Gordon, 
and  a  copy  of  "  Pagan  Poems,"  given  by  Mr.  George 
Moore  to  Oscar  Wilde. 

The  list  is  indicative  both  of  Mr.  Newton's  tastes 
and  of  his  disHkes.  He  is  promiscuous  enough  within 
certain  limits.  But  he  has  few  really  old  English 
books,  and  he  is  thoroughly  indifferent  to  early- 
printed  books,  which  he  refers  to  casually  as 
"  Aldines  and  Elzevirs,"  ignoring  the  fact  that 
physically  they  are,  as  a  body,  the  most  beautiful 
books  in  the  world.  It  is  true  that  he  says  he  buys 
books  that  he  can  read  :  and  that  most  early  books 
are  (not  that  one  would  read  them  if  they  weren't) 
in  Greek  and  Latin.  But  I  doubt  if  he  habitually 
peruses  "  The  Life  of  the  Prince  Consort."  The 

19 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

truth  comes  out  in  his  confession  :  "I  collect  as 
I  can  human-interest  books."  If  he  could  find  an 
Aldine  Cicero  which  (say)  Fanny  Brawne  had  given 
to  Claire  Clairmont  he  would  pay  any  money  for  it. 
He  reads  a  great  deal,  and  his  tastes  are  marked.  He 
cannot  care  very  much  for  verse  or  there  would  be 
more  early  poets  in  his  library  ;  his  own  candid 
sentence  runs  :  *'  I  have  always  liked  Pope.  In  read- 
ing him  one  has  the  sense  of  progress  from  idea  to 
idea,  not  a  mere  floundering  about  in  Arcady  amid 
star-stuff."  His  favourite  book  is  Boswell,  his  heroes 
are  Johnson  and  Lamb  :  there  are  none  better. 
But  he  does  not  restrict  his  collecting  to  the  litera- 
ture he  likes,  and  he  cannot  plausibly  pretend  that 
Sir  Theodore  Martin  is  among  his  favourite  authors 
or  Beardsley  an  artist  to  whom  admirers  of  Lamb 
are  naturally  drawn.  The  fact  is  that  he  has  a  passion 
for  possessing  little  fragments  of  people's  Hves,  an 
interest  in  relics,  anecdotes,  glimpses  of  character. 
Most  is  known  and  most  survives  (generally  speak- 
ing) of  men  near  our  own  date,  and  contemporary 
fashion  partly  dictates  to  Mr.  Newton  what  he  shall 
collect.  If  Mr.  Beerbohm's  "  Enoch  Soames  "  were 
suddenly  decided  to  be  both  real  and  important,  Mr. 
Newton  would  be  the  first  in  the  field  for  an  auto- 
graph copy  or  an  agreement  between  Soames  and 
his  pubHsher.  He  would  then  be  able  to  look  cheer- 
fully at  his  shelves  and  feel  that  a  fragment  of  this 
illustrious  dead  man's  universally  familiar  life  re- 
posed on  his  shelves.  It  is,  aufond^  the  same  passion 
as  that  which  led  the  reverent  Mayor  to  frame  and 
glaze  the  butt-end  of  the  cigar  which  King  Edward 
had  thrown  on  the  station  platform,  and  the  piece 

20 


A  BOOK-COLLECTOR 

of  toast  in  which  the  Royal  teeth  had  made  a  semi- 
circular identation. 

Personally,  I  do  not  share  that  taste.  I  like  first 
editions  of  books  in  which  I  am  interested,  and  I 
covet  Keats 's  Spenser.  But  I  no  more  want  (what 
Mr.  Newton  possesses)  Charles  Lamb's  letters  to 
Miss  Kelly,  the  actress,  than  I  want  a  lock  of  Shake- 
speare's hair  (scarce  as  it  seems  to  have  been  even 
in  his  lifetime),  or  one  of  Napoleon's  bedroom 
slippers.  Manuscript  poems,  yes,  or  prose  by  certain 
people  ;  but  not  the  MSS.  of  any  and  every  author 
whom  other  people  think  good.  Still,  I  can  under- 
stand the  taste  ;  and,  whatever  a  man  collects,  the 
zest  of  the  chase  is  the  main  thing  :  the  excitement 
of  putting  up  the  quarry  and  the  satisfaction  of 
returning  home  with  one  more  pelt.  There  is  nothing 
either  meritorious  or  discreditable  about  a  pursuit 
like  Mr.  Newton's.  There  is  a  sort  of  book-collector 
who  perform  services,  and  valuable  services,  to 
literature  and  history.  It  is  largely  through  their 
means  that  books  have  been  preserved  which  would 
otherwise  have  been  lost,  that  our  museums  have 
been  fed  with  a  stream  of  rare  and  valuable  works, 
that  editors  have  been  able  to  develop  the  useful 
science  of  bibliography  and  to  standardise  texts. 
Had  it  not  been  for  this  body  of  sentimentahsts, 
hobby-riders  and  hoarders,  the  early  editions  of 
many  of  our  great  writers,  by  these  secluded  and 
cared  for,  would  have  utterly  disappeared.  The 
collections  of  plays  made  by  several  American 
collectors,  the  complete  collection  of  Stevensons 
made  (at  prodigious  cost)  by  young  Mr.  Widener, 
who  went  down  with  the  *'  Titanic,"  are  done  with 

21 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

a  public  as  well  as  a  private  object  :  and  I  have 
never  understood  why  people  should  resent  collec- 
tions being  made  by  Americans,  who  share  our  speech 
and  our  past,  and  cannot  be  expected  to  content 
themselves  with  the  works  of  Washington  Irving 
and  the  pictorial  inscriptions  of  the  Aztecs.  But 
much  of  the  collecting  of  Mr.  Newton  and  men  like 
him  serves  no  object  except  to  please  him  (surely  a 
harmless  one),  and  to  disappoint  persons  in  this 
country  (who  are  few)  who  share  his  mania  for  scraps 
of  autograph  and  find  that  they  cannot  stand  up 
against  his  purse. 

But  I  should  add  one  word.  There  was  a  third, 
probably  not  a  preconceived,  object  with  Mr. 
Newton  :  that  of  writing  a  book  about  his  collection 
and  its  acquisition.  The  result  justifies  him.  His 
book,  though  one  sometimes  gets  a  little  tired  of  the 
perpetual  dollars,  is  full  of  amusing  gossip  and  odd 
stories,  and  the  chapters  on  authors  in  whom  he  is 
especially  interested  (above  all  that  on  Boswell)  are 
full  of  sense  and  pleasantly  haphazard  information. 
Many  of  his  illustrations  add  charm  to  the  pot- 
pourri. Anybody  with  a  touch  of  the  collector  in 
him  or  the  slightest  fondness  for  the  gossipy  kind 
of  literary  history  will  find  him  readable.  But  neither 
he  nor  anybody  else  has  yet  written  the  classic  of 
book-collecting  or  autograph  collecting.  The  formid- 
able works  of  the  Rev.  T.  F.  Dibdin,  so  popular 
once  in  the  palmy  days  of  English  bibliophily,  are 
now  unreadable,  partly  because  of  the  shifting  of 
taste  and  partly  because  of  the  intolerably  rhapsodical 
verbosity  of  Mr.  Dibdin's  style.  Burton's  '*  Book- 
Hunter  "  is  very  good,  but  very  scrappy.  We  still 

22 


A  BOOK-COLLECTOR 

wait  the  thorough  history  of  a  fine  collection,  which 
several  men  in  England  and  America  (Mr.  Wise  is 
an  example)  could  give.  To  write  that  classic  a  man 
must  have  inexhaustible  curiosity  and  a  good 
memory,  erudition  and  humour  :  it  will  contain 
very  little  literary  criticism,  but  much  human  nature 
and  many  extraordinary  tales.  For  there  is  no  end 
to  the  strange  adventures  that  books  have  had  or  the 
strange  places  in  which  they  have  been  found,  and 
in  the  history  of  mere  bibliography,  matter  of  types, 
spacing  and  pagination,  there  are  detective  stories 
more  elaborate  and  ingenious  than  those  of  Poe. 


23 


EDITING  SHAKESPEARE 

THERE  was  a  clear  case  for  a  new  critical 
edition  of  Shakespeare.  Had  knowledge  re- 
mained where  it  was  in  the  eighteenth  century  there 
would  have  been  constant  new  editions,  but  small 
need  for  them.  It  was  an  amusing  occupation  to  take 
Shakespeare's  obscurer  words  and  sentences  one 
by  one  and  suggest  other  words  as  those  which  he 
probably  wrote,  and  the  pastime  occasionally  gave 
an  emendation  splendid  in  its  ingenuity,  such  as  the 
famous  "  'A  babbled  of  green  fields  "for  ''  A  table 
of  green  fields."  It  was  also  amusing  to  compare  all 
the  early  texts,  and,  where  they  differed,  to  choose 
the  punctuation  or  the  phrasing  which  the  critic 
would  have  used  had  he  been  Shakespeare.  But 
there  could  be  little  real  progress  until  critics  were 
agreed  as  to  the  respective  authority  of  the  various 
texts,  and  even  agreement  on  that  (w^ere  no  more 
discovered)  could  not  in  itself  carry  as  much  farther. 
In  our  own  day,  however,  the  development  of  the 
bibliographical  and  calligraphical  sciences  has  placed 
us  in  the  possession  of  apparatus  without  which 
even  the  ablest  of  the  old  editors  were  at  a  great 
disadvantage.  Mr.  Pollard  has  demonstrated  that  in 
all  probability  the  "  good  Quartos  "  were  printed 
from  Shakespeare's  MSS.  at  his  instructions,  that 
he  supervised  his  publications  during  his  lifetime, 
and  that  the  editors  of  the  First  Folio  were  acting 
specifically  as  his  literary  executors.  Mr.  Pollard 
and  Mr.  Simpson  have  miade  it  plain  that  the  punc- 
tuation, which  to  the  mere  reader  often  appears 


EDITING  SHAKESPEARE 

absurd  in  its  vagaries,  was  deliberately  contrived  as 
a  guide  to  the  proper  speaking  of  the  words.  The 
scientific  comparison  of  the  various  sorts  of  plain 
errors  which  occur  in  the  texts  has  given  a  clue  to 
the  nature  of  Shakespeare's  handwriting,  and  thus 
to  the  solution  of  other  errors  which  have  puzzled 
everybody.  Over  and  above  this  Sir  E.  Maunde 
Thompson  has  attempted  to  show  (and  the  Cam- 
bridge editors  appear  to  think,  as  I  diffidently  do 
myself,  that  he  has  proved  his  case),  that  the  British 
Museum  possesses  a  manuscript  play,  part  of  which 
is  in  Shakespeare's  handwriting.  Finally,  critics  in 
our  days  have,  or  can  make,  use  of  men  who  have  a 
technical  knowledge  of  printing  and  binding  which 
their  predecessors  lacked,  and  which  may  unravel 
many  small  mysteries. 

The  results  of  all  this  may,  of  course,  be  exagger- 
ated. Nothing  very  revolutionary  can  happen  to  the 
great  mass  of  Shakespeare's  lines,  because  (fortu- 
nately) they  are  quite  well  as  they  are.  We  do  not  find 
in  the  new  Cambridge  edition  a  mass  of  revolutionary 
notes,  for  there  is  no  need  for  them.  The  editors,  in 
fact,  have  wisely  kept  both  the  speculative,  textual, 
and  the  purely  explanatory  notes  down  to  the  mini- 
mum necessary  to  elucidate  the  play.  But  the  nature 
of  some  of  their  notes,  which  I  may  illustrate  with 
a  few  specimens,  would  make  Dr.  Johnson  rub  his 
eyes  : 

155,  decked.  Generally  explained  as  ''  sprinkled," 
but  N.  E.  D.  gives  no  support.  Read  eked^  i.e.y 
increased  (v.  N.  E.  D.  and  M.  V.  3.  2.  23)  ; 
Prospero's  tears  added  salt  to  salt.  Shakespeare 

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probably  wrote  "  eekt  "  with  an  oversized  initial, 
and  the  compositor  took  it  for  "  dekt."  v.  T.  i.,  p. 
xli.  and  cf.  e  and  d  of  "  rule  "  and  ''  bid,"  Facs.  1.  5. 

100,  Who  having  into  truths  etc.  Much  annotated, 
and  clearly  corrupt.  Read  minted  for  **  into,"  and 
the  whole  context  gains.  .  .  .  The  misprint  may 
be  explained  thus  :  Shakespeare  wrote  "  minted" 
with  one  or  two  minims  short,  and  with  the  ed 
like  oe  ;  this  the  compositor  read  as  "  inntoe," 
or  *'  intoe,"  and  set  up  as  ''  into  "  ! 

367,  he  quick  thou'st  best.  Absence  of  punctu- 
ation denotes  rapid  delivery. 

91,  O,  defend  me  I  A  space  on  the  F.  [FolioJ, 
before  *'  O,"  suggests  that  the  word  ''  God  "  has 
been  omitted  because  of  the  blasphemy  laws. 

The  new  methods,  of  course,  still  afford  a  good  deal 
of  room  for  the  play  of  editorial  fancy  and  for  dis- 
putes between  experts.  But  they  are  likely  to  settle 
many  problems  hitherto  not  certainly  soluble,  and 
the  succeeding  volumes  of  this  edition  should  con- 
tain many  agreeable  surprises. 

One  cannot  here  go  into  the  details  of  the  editors' 
treatment  of  the  text  of  ''  The  Tempest."  There  is 
less  scope  for  their  beneficent  efforts  here,  as  there 
has  been  less  for  the  misguided  zeal  of  the  old  emen- 
dators  and  text-constructors,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  the  Folio  supplies  our  only  text  of  the  play. 
But  there  is  no  element  of  the  fantastic  in  the  notes, 
and  the  accompanying  essays  are  admirable.  Mr. 
Wilson  writes  a  textual  introduction,  there  are  short 
treatises  on  punctuation,  on  *'  The  Tempest,"  on 
the  copy  used  for  '*  The  Tempest,"  and  on  its  stage 

26 


EDITING  SHAKESPEARE 

history.  There  is  a  glossary,  and,  since  it  is  the  first 
volume,  there  is  ''  Q's  "  general  introduction  to  the 
series.  This  essay  is  ideal  for  the  purpose  ;  it  is  both 
interesting  and  amusing  in  itself  and  a  perfect 
assurance  that  the  editors  are  equipped  with  the 
best  weapons  and  will  use  them  with  that  taste  and 
common  sense  without  which  the  best  weapons  are 
liable  to  be  dangerous.  Sir  Arthur,  in  repeating  the 
old  story  that  Shakespeare  "  never  troubled  him- 
self or  anybody  to  collect,  correct,  and  print  "  his 
plays,  is  ignoring  the  conclusions  reached  in  Mr.  Pol- 
lard's recent  "  Shakespeare's  Fight  with  the  Pirates  "  ; 
otherwise  every  word  he  says  commands  assent. 

Finally,  I  just  remember  to  add,  the  volume  con- 
tains a  play  by  Shakespeare  ;  not  the  greatest,  but 
perhaps  the  most  nearly  perfect  of  them  all.  Flaw- 
lessness  is  not  a  quality  that  can  be  generally  found 
in  him  by  anyone  who  is  not  a  blind  worshipper  ; 
and  it  is  a  pity  that  the  recognition  of  the  faults 
without  which  he  would  have  been  superhuman 
has  generally  been  left  to  his  enemies,  the  people 
who  have  no  relish  for  life  or  do  not  like  poetry.  As 
Sir  Arthur  Quiller- Couch  says,  he  "  had  often  to 
do  odd  jobs,  was  often  careless,  and  sometimes  wrote 
extremely  ill."  But  in  this  play  there  is  nothing  that 
jars,  little  that  puzzles.  It  was  probably  written  more 
easily  than  anything  he  did,  but  he  scamped  nothing 
of  it.  He  tackled  the  problem  of  telling,  in  the  space 
of  a  few  hours,  a  story  which  covered  many  years, 
and  the  right  way  came  to  him  in  a  flash  at  last. 
**  Another  part  of  the  same  island,"  "  another  part 
of  the  same  island  "  :  the  delicious  scenes,  all 
matched  in  scale  and  charm,  succeed  one  another 

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like  a  string  of  equal  pearls  ;  and  the  whole  play 
leaves  nothing  behind  but  a  delicious  fragrance  on 
the  air.  The  characters  are  not  "  worked  out." 
Prospero,  Alonso,  Sebastian — they  are  just  sufficient 
for  this  kind  of  play.  Ferdinand  and  Miranda  are 
the  faintly- tinted,  delightful  lovers  of  a  pastoral,  the 
prince  and  princess  of  a  fairy-tale.  Stephano,  rich 
as  he  is,  has  not  the  solidity  of  the  earlier  broad 
comic  figures.  Caliban  is  the  only  one  whose  mind 
provokes  one  to  speculation,  and  even  he  (poor 
monster)  will  not  bear  the  load  that  Browning  im- 
posed on  him.  They  are  all  in  tone  with  each  other 
and  with  the  wedding  Masque  that  was  surely  (if 
the  main  play  was  earlier)  interpolated  for  the  nup- 
tials of  EHzabeth  of  Bohemia.  There  is  no  real  con- 
flict, little  serious  meditation  about  things  ;  it  is  a 
golden  tissue  for  which  all  description  is  inadequate, 
and  which,  nevertheless,  is  so  soundly  conceived 
and  woven  that  any  sort  of  performance  of  it — even 
so  (I  don't  speak  offensively)  homely  and  haphazard 
a  production  as  that  at  the  Aldwych — must  please 
the  person  who  is  capable  of  being  pleased  by  it  at 
all.  It  may  have  been  Shakespeare's  swan-song,  and 
would  certainly  be  a  dramatically  effective  one. 

But  can  we  be  sure  that  it  was  consciously  so  ? 
Men  frequently  state,  as  though  it  were  a  known 
fact,  that  ''  The  Tempest  "  (paradoxically  so-called) 
is  Shakespeare's  placid  farewell.  He  had  gone  through 
a  period  of  storm  and  stress.  He  had  doubted  with 
Hamlet  and  Macbeth,  raved  with  Lear  and  Othello  ; 
he  had  questioned  divine  justice  and  human  fidelity, 
contemplated  the  abysses  of  existence  and  of  evil  ; 
and,  after  years  of  distress  verging  on  mania,  had 


EDITING  SHAKESPEARE 

won  peace  and  paid  his  final  respects  to  the  world 
in  a  fantastic  play  in  which  wickedness  was  scarcely 
serious,  the  triumph  of  good  never  in  doubt,  and  all 
ended  happily.  *'  Here,"  they  conceive  him  as  re- 
marking, *'  is  the  outcome  of  it  all.  At  one  time  I 
asked  many  questions  and  received  few  answers.  I 
was  tortured  and  I  groaned  ;  I  w^as  bewildered  and 
I  cried  against  the  scheme  of  things.  My  passions 
weakened  ;  I  became  reconciled  ;  I  was  content 
to  take  the  things  I  had  ;  I  sailed  into  a  calm  after 
the  storm  ;  I  laid  my  blessing  upon  all  things  ;  and 
I  broke  my  wand."  Particularly  as  to  the  breaking 
of  the  wand  they  have  found  in  Prospero  the  symbol 
of  Shakespeare's  self  :  everything  he  wished  for 
was  accomplished,  and  the  need  for  further  effort 
was  gone. 

This  may  all  be  true  :  we  cannot  say  that  it  is  not. 
But  it  is  as  well  to  remember  that  hypothesis  is  not 
the  same  thing  as  fact.  ''  The  Tempest  "  was,  be- 
yond doubt,  one  of  Shakespeare's  last  plays  (for 
sentimental  purposes  we  can  pretend  that  we  know 
it  to  be  actually  the  last),  and  beyond  doubt  he  did 
retire  to  Stratford  on  a  competence.  But  if  he  de- 
liberately broke  his  wand  he  was  the  first  and  last 
poet  in  the  world  who  ever  did  so  at  his  age.  He 
must  have  been  preternaturally  prescient  if  he  knew 
that  he  would  die  at  the  age  of  fifty- two,  owing  (as 
is  supposed)  to  the  insanitary  conditions  of  the  neigh- 
bourhood :  and  he  must  have  had  a  mental  con- 
stitution unique  in  the  world's  history  if,  after  writ- 
ing a  succession  of  masterpieces,  he  decided  point 
blank  that  he  would  never  write  another  line.  Poets 
are  not  usually  made  like  that  ;  when  they  are  moved 

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they  cannot  usually  help  themselves.  And  poets  do 
not  necessarily  go  through  a  rounded  arc  of  experi- 
ence which  leaves  them  in  middle  age  beyond 
possibility  of  further  change.  We  may,  it  is  hardly 
necessary  to  say,  run  risks  in  assuming  too  close  a 
connection  between  Shakespeare's  experience  and 
his  themes.  Men  are  not  necessarily  leading  miser- 
able lives  when  they  are  writing  tragedies,  nor  com- 
placent lives  when  they  are  writing  comedies.  But 
even  if  we  do  assume  that  connection,  that  ''  serene 
that  Men  call  age  "  is  one  thing,  and  the  exhaustion 
of  emotion  and  ambition  at  fifty  is  another.  Shake- 
speare, as  a  matter  of  fact  (so  far  as  we  can  discover 
from  internal  and  external  evidence),  was  always  a 
man  outwardly  equable  and  companionable  ;  *'  the 
gentle  unjealous  Shakespeare,"  Mr.  Bridges  has 
called  him,  and  the  conception  is  traditional.  That 
is  not  the  sort  of  man  who  changes  much,  and,  by 
all  analogy,  such  a  prolific  writer  is  not  the  sort  of 
writer  who  ever  stops  writing.  He  was  probably  at 
any  time  of  his  life  temperamentally  capable  of  both 
tragedy  and  comedy  ;  he  probably  was  so  at  the  end. 
Need  we  assume  that  he  ever  actually  did  lay  down 
his  pen  ?  It  is  surely  conceivable  that  in  retirement 
at  Stratford  he  at  least  toyed  with  new  plays  and 
may  have  begun,  or  even  completed,  new  poems. 
After  the  funeral,  Anne  Hathaway — who  had  never 
been  taught  that  publication  was  very  profitable 
and  had  not  heard  of  the  autograph  market — des- 
troyed them  as  what  she  called  "a  lot  of  old  rubbish." 
Should  some  of  them  come  to  light  and  prove  to  be 
as  sombre  as  "  Hamlet,"  a  great  deal  of  conjectural 
biography  would  be  destroyed. 

30 


WILLIAM  JAMES'S  LETTERS 

THE  author  of  "  The  Principles  of  Psycho- 
logy," son  of  one  of  the  most  robust  and 
eccentric  theologians  and  brother  of  Henry  James 
the  novelist,  led  a  more  active  and  diversified  life 
than  commonly  falls  to  the  lot  of  philosophers.  He 
began  as  an  art  student,  then  contemplated  becom- 
ing a  printer,  vv'ent  up  the  Amazon  on  a  zoological 
expedition,  took  to  medicine,  was  successively  pro- 
fessor of  physiology,  of  psychology,  and  of  phil- 
osophy, travelled  widely,  met  half  the  most  eminent 
men  of  his  time,  and  died  leaving  a  name  familiar 
to  tens  of  thousands.  The  career  testifies  to  that 
essential  personal  element  in  him  which  he  referred 
to  when  he  said  that  what  Henry  of  Navarre's  sol- 
diers followed  was  his  white  plume.  But  beyond  his 
adventurousness,  zest  for  life  and  versatility,  he  had 
a  quality  equally  infrequent  in  the  schools  :  a  relish 
for  and  a  gift  for  crude  fun.  This  may  have  been  a 
last  exasperating  straw  to  those  who  could  not  bear 
his  doctrines  ;  conceive  Aristotle  or  Kant  signing  a 
letter  to  his  mother,  "  Your  bold,  your  beautiful, 
your  Blossom."  But  it  has  merits  in  the  subject  of 
a  biography,  and  this  collection  of  letters  joined  by 
a  commentary  is  as  readable  a  book  as  has  been 
published  for  years. 

There  is  very  little  polemic  or  exposition  of  phil- 
osophy in  the  letters  printed  in  these  selections 
which  Mr.  Henry  James,  jun.,  has  made.  They  are 
personal,  not  professional,  letters.  James's  main 
interests  are,  naturally,  often  reflected  in  sentences  or 

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pafagraphs.  A  well-known  passage  in  "  Varieties  o£ 
Religious  Experience  "  concerning  emergence  from 
profound  pessimism  is  given  here  as  a  record  of  the 
crisis  in  James's  own  life  (aet.  27),  and  there  is  an 
interesting  note  of  that  date  :  *'  My  first  act  of  free 
will  shall  be  to  believe  in  free  will."  We  find  in  1879 
a  curt  reference  to  the  beginnings  of  the  work  on 
which  his  fame  was  to  be  chiefly  built :  **  I  am  writing 
(very  slowly)  what  may  become  a  text-book  of 
psychology  "  ;  and  two  pages  after  there  is  a  char- 
acteristic remark  about  one  battalion  of  his  Hfe-long 
foes  : 

My  ignorant  prejudice  against  all  Hegelians, 
except  Hegel  himself,  grows  wusser  and  vvusser. 
Their  sacerdotal  airs  !  and  their  sterility  !  Con- 
templating their  navels  and  the  syllable  oum  ! 

In  1882  he  tells  his  mother  that  there  are  few  gen- 
uine philosophers  about,  *'  and  I  really  believe  that 
in  my  way  I  have  a  wider  view  of  the  field  than  any- 
one I've  seen  (I  count  out,  of  course,  my  ignorance 
of  ancient  authors)."  In  1885  he  writes  :  "  There  is 
no  such  superstition  as  the  idolatry  of  the  Whole  " 
— a  sentence  often  echoed  by  him,  notably  in  his 
description  of  the  monist's  universe  as  a  "  block- 
universe  "  and  of  the  monist  himself  as  "  wallowing 
in  a  sense  of  unbridled  unity."  In  1904  he  tells  Pro- 
fessor Holhous  to 

take  the  sterilest  scientific  prig  and  cad  you  know, 
compare  him  with  the  richest  religious  intellect 
you  know,  and  you  would  not  .  .  .  give  the 
former  the  exclusive  right  of  way. 

32 


WILLIAM  JAMES'S  LETTERS 

In  the  same  letter  is  a  striking  example  of  the  phrase- 
ology which  maddened  some  people  : 

Your  distinction  between  "  spurious "  and 
genuine  courage  reminds  me  a  bit  too  much  of 
*'  true  "  and  "  false  "  freedom,  and  other  sancti- 
monious "  come-offs." 

"  I  have,"  he  writes  in  that  year,  ''  no  living  sense 
of  commerce  with  a  God.  I  envy  those  who  have." 
Casual  conversational  remarks  of  this  sort  are  fre- 
quent ;  they  will  be  of  great  interest  to  those  who 
read  them  in  the  Hght  of  his  books.  But  if  the  letters 
have  any  *'  influence  "  it  will  not  be  through  these, 
but  through  the  example  they  show  of  a  life  lived 
honestly  and  with  gusto.  Their  main  interest  de- 
rives from  the  reflection  of  that  life,  from  the  vivid 
and  warming  picture  of  an  interesting  family  circle 
and  a  variegated  circle  of  friends,  and  from  the  per- 
petual shower  of  anecdote,  serious  and  comic  des- 
cription of  daily  events,  brief  judgments  on  men  and 
affairs,  which  proceeded  from  James's  lively  fountain 
of  a  mind.  One  can  but  illustrate  these  by  a  few 
random  specimens. 

To  current  politics  there  are  few  references.  He 
wrote  in  1870  that  "  if  Alsace-Lorraine  be  taken, 
there  must  be  another  war,"  and  in  1871  that  "  the 
German  Liberals  will  have  the  harder  battle  to  fight 
at  home  for  the  next  twenty  years."  He  hoped,  later 
on,  that  the  Boers  and  the  Filipinos  would  win  their 
wars,  and  he  was  indignant  about  the  condemnation 
of  Dreyfus.  But  the  political  things  which  really  in- 
terested him  were  of  a  less  momentary  kind.  Every- 
body knows   how   largely  his   brother   Henry  was 

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preoccupied  with  differences  in  national  character 
and  in  the  qualities  of  various  civilisations.  It  was  a 
natural  preoccupation  in  an  American  familiar  with 
Europe,  and  William  shared  it.  His  examinations 
were  less  subtle  than  Henry's,  and  his  views  (especi- 
ally about  the  Germans)  fluctuated  a  good  deal.  At 
one  moment  he  is  bowed  in  admiration  before  the 
Germans  ;  at  another,  exasperated  by  their  solemn 
verbosity,  he  is  referring  to  ''  the  human,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  German  mind."  He  never  was 
drawn  to  the  French,  and  he  seems  to  have  come 
with  some  reluctance  to  the  conviction  that  the 
English  (whom  he  found  the  only  non- American 
people  capable  of  blushing)  were  the  people  most  to 
his  taste.  Against  all  of  them  he  contrasted  America, 
raw  America,  confused,  uneducated,  self-satisfied 
Am.erica,  America  full  of  "  bald-headed  young 
Ph.D.s,  boring  each  other  at  seminaries."  He  felt 
the  tug  which  pulled  Henry  to  Europe  and  kept  him 
there,  but  he  was  resolved  to  stand  by  his  own  coun- 
try and  help  in  shaping  a  future  which  he  was  certain 
would  be  great. 

A  preoccupation  with  the  future,  with  the  con- 
tinued adventure  of  mankind  and  the  enlargement 
of  the  bounds  of  knowledge,  is  reflected  in  his  com- 
ments on  books.  James  was  a  voracious  reader,  but 
he  does  not  seem  to  have  been  very  fond  of  pure 
literature,  although  his  taste  was  fairly  good.  There 
are  few  criticisms  of  novels  or  poems,  and  these  are 
short.  He  was  greatly  impressed  by  Turgeneff,  was 
interested  by  ''  Daniel  Deronda,"  and  found  Sir 
Walter  Scott  "  a  dear  old  boy."  He  preferred  authors 
who  bestowed  the  graces  of  literature  on  works  of 

34 


WILLIAM  JAMES'S  LETTERS 

religious  or  philosophic  interest.  His  criticisms  on 
these  are  full  of  interest.  He  found  in  Emerson  ''  too 
little  understanding  of  the  morbid  side  of  life  "  ;  of 
Goethe  he  said,  '*  There  is  a  deal  of  naivete  in  the 
old  cuss."  Mr.  Arthur  Balfour's  *'  Foundations  of 
BeHef  "  he  thought  worth  fifty  German  books  :  "  It 
almost  makes  me  a  Liberal-Unionist  "  ;  and  he 
described  Mr.  Chesterton  as  ''  a  tremendously  strong 
writer  and  true  thinker,  despite  his  mannerism  of 
paradox."  An  ampler  portrait  is  that  of  Renan  : 

So  the  magician  Renan  is  no  more  !  .  .  .  The 
queer  thing  was  that  he  so  slowly  worked  his  way 
to  his  natural  mental  attitude  of  irony  and  persi- 
flage, on  a  basis  of  moral  and  religious  material. 
He  levitated  at  last  to  his  true  level  of  superficial- 
ity, emancipating  himself  from  layer  after  layer 
of  the  inhibitions  into  which  he  was  born,  and 
finally  using  the  old  moral  and  religious  vocabu- 
lary to  produce  merely  musical  and  poetical  effects. 
That  moral  and  reUgious  ideals,  seriously  taken, 
involve  certain  refusals  and  renunciations  of  free- 
dom, Renan  seemed  at  last  entirely  to  forget.  On 
the  whole,  his  sweetness  and  mere  literary 
coquetry  leave  a  displeasing  impression,  and  the 
only  way  to  handle  him  is  not  to  take  him  heavily 
or  seriously.  The  worst  is,  he  was  a  prig  in  his 
ideals. 

The  most  elaborate  piece  of  purely  literary  criticism 
in  the  letters  is  addressed  to  his  brother  Henry.  Mr. 
PhiUp  Guedalla  has  recently  divided  Henry's  career 
into  the  three  periods  of  James  I.,  James  II,  and  the 

35 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Old  Pretender.  It  may  be  presumed,  from  William 
James's  vehement  abuse  of  his  brother's  '*  third 
manner,"  that  this  dynastic  arrangement  would  have 
pleased  him.  But  Henry  was  unperturbed.  One  of 
the  early  references  to  Henry  (1867)  contains 
the  phrase  "  the  serene  Harry  deaHng  his  snubs 
around."  To  the  onslaught  of  forty  years  after  the 
serene  Harry  replied  that  if  he  found  that  his  books 
were  pleasing  William  he  should  begin  to  grow 
seriously  alarmed  about  their  merits.  The  relations 
between  these  two  throughout  the  book  are  delight- 
ful ;  the  years  of  separation  never  in  the  least  im- 
paired their  affectionate  intimacy  ;  each  immensely 
admired  the  other  and  thought  him  (we  may  suspect) 
slightly  comic. 

I  leave  it  to  more  competent  people  to  discuss 
what  has  happened  and  will  happen  to  James's  ideas. 
During  his  Hfetime  there  were  those  who  revered 
him  as  a  Copernicus  of  philosophy  and  those  who 
detested  him  as  a  picturesque,  and  perverse  dis- 
seminator of  false  notions,  a  '*  journalist  "  even — 
to  use  the  term  which  (alas),  in  modern  intellectual 
controversies,  is  always  supposed  to  convey  the  last 
opprobrium.  That  his  **  popular  "  vogue,  for  what 
it  was  worth,  would  pass  was  inevitable  ;  for  the 
large  dabbling  public  he  is  no  longer  the  latest 
"  stunt."  In  1 910,  the  last  year  of  his  life,  James  met 
for  the  first  time  the  man  who,  as  (shall  we  say  ?)  a 
subject  of  the  higher  kind  of  dinner-table  conver- 
sation holds  now  the  place  which  James  held  fifteen 
years  ago.  "  I  hope,"  he  wrote,  "  that  Freud  and 
his  pupils  will  push  their  ideas  to  their  utmost  limits, 
so  that  we  may  learn  what  they  are.  They  can't  fail 

36 


WILLIAM  JAMES'S  LETTERS 

to  throw  light  on  human  nature  ;  but  I  confess  that 
he  made  on  me  personally  the  impression  of  a  man 
obsessed  with  fixed  ideas."  The  impression  was 
correct  ;  and  James  can  have  found  Uttle  of  "  the 
white  plume  of  Henry  of  Navarre  "  about  that  most 
cumbrous  and  humourless  of  plodding  mono- 
maniacs. He  could  "  make  nothing  "  of  Freud's 
dream  theories.  Yet  if  he  were  writing  now  he  would 
certainly  have  to  take  cognisance  of  Freud,  he  would 
certainly  have  to  admit  a  core  of  truth  v/ithin  Freud's 
cocoon  of  dreary  fantasy,  and  he  would,  I  imagine, 
be  forced  to  admit  that  Freud's  discoveries  must 
lead  to  some  modification  in  his  own  picture  of 
things  :  for  instance  (I  walk  diffidently  on  such 
ground)  by  introducing  a  new  restriction  of  the  area 
which  he  regarded  as  open  to  free  choice  by  the  con- 
sciousness. 

The  one  thing  certain  is  that  whatever  happened 
to  his  theories  (in  the  way,  not  of  what  he  thought 
crass  opposition,  but  of  genuine  supersession)  he 
would  not  mind.  He  would  cheer  the  advance  of 
creative  evolution.  For  he  was  not  the  ambitious 
constructor  of  a  pet,  a  sacred,  system,  but  a  frank, 
fearless,  and  jolly  man  who  loved  Life  and  was  at  its 
service.  In  the  whole  of  these  two  volumes  of  letters 
there  is  not  a  selfish,  a  cruel,  a  priggish,  or  a  dull 
sentence.  His  philosophy,  in  spite  of  the  wide  and 
salutary  influence  of  the  spirit  behind  it  (described 
by  his  enemies  as  American  Commercialism,  Ameri- 
can Uplift,  etc.)  upon  the  lay  public,  has  never 
obtained  much  of  a  hold  upon  the  academic  world. 
Those  systems  which  do  seldom  obtain  much  of  a 
hold  (are  in  fact  regarded  as  awe-inspiring  gibberish) 

37 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

ever)rw'here  else  ;  and,  anyhow,  all  our  systems, 
however  elaborately  logical,  will  die,  as  James's  will, 
and  their  instructive  mummies  will  be  ranged  in  that 
mortuary  catacomb  which  we  call  the  history  of 
thought.  But  James,  at  lowest,  was  certainly  a  land- 
mark in  the  progress  of  psychology  ;  even  his  least 
defensible  propositions  had  the  great  quality  of 
stimulating  thought ;  and  whatever  might  happen  to 
his  theories,  both  his  works  and  these  letters  will 
continue  to  be  read  for  the  simple  reason  that  they 
are  delightful  reading,  and  that  their  author  was  one 
of  the  most  fascinating  and  lovable  characters  in  the 
American  record.  There  is  always  a  place  for  the 
philosophic  writer,  however  pragmatical,  who  does 
not  give  one  a  headache.  And  there  is  a  great  deal 
surely  to  be  said  for  one  who,  seeing  all  the  furniture 
in  his  room  leaping  at  the  shock  of  the  San  Francisco 
earthquake,  felt  "  no  fear,  only  admiration  for  the 
way  a  wooden  house  could  prove  its  elasticity, '*  and 
glee  over  the  vividness  of  the  manner  in  which  such 
an  *'  abstract  idea"  as  ''  earthquake  "  could  verify 
itself  into  sensible  reality. 


38 


BAUDELAIRE 

MR.     SYMONS'S    essay    on    Baudelaire    is 
slight  and  rather  disappointing.  It  has  faults 
not   usual  in  his  books.   Even  those  who  do  not 
approve  his  attitude  towards  art  and  life  or,  usually, 
share  his  critical  admirations,  must  admit  that  he 
has  generally  been  a  lucid  critic,  careful  of  his  English 
and  careful  of  his  form  ;    exercising,  in  fact,  that 
fastidiousness  and  aiming  at  that  perfection  which 
delight  him  in  his  favourite  artists,  whether  poets, 
dancers,  or  music-hall  performers.  His  "Baudelaire'* 
is  scrappy  ;   it  lacks  shape  ;    it  is  neither  a  "  life  " 
nor  a  thorough  study.  It  is  (if  I  may  use  the  offensive 
words  inoffensively)  padded  out  with  a  chapter  on 
Villiers  de  I'lsle  Adam  which  appears  to  have  been 
written  long  before  the  rest  of  the  book  and  has  no 
obvious  connection  with  what  goes  before  and  after; 
and  its  English  is  remarkably  rough,  grammatically 
and  otherwise,  if  judged  by  the  standard  Mr.  Symons 
himself  has  set.  The  bibliography  is  useful.  There 
are  a  certain  number  of  "  facts  "  in  the  book  which 
will  be  interesting  to  those  who  are  unfamiliar  with 
Baudelairean  literature  ;    and  the  reader  who  likes 
the  flavour  of  a  bygone  fashion  may  derive  some 
entertainment  from  the   delightful  obstinacy  with 
which  Mr.  Symons  maintains  his  desperately   de- 
tached attitude  towards  the  seven  sins  and  the  seven 
thousand  diseases.  He,  whatever  may  happen  to  the 
rest  of  the  world,  is  not  going  to  be  thrown  off  his 
balance  by  considerations  of  morals  and  hygiene. 
He  sings  the  old  tune  which  has  strayed  on  from 

39 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

the  days  of  Gautier's  "  Moi  je  fais  emaux  et 
camees."  How  charming  a  perversion  !  How  beauti- 
fully stated  a  brutality  !  How  harmonious  a  blas- 
phemy !  But,  granted  his  point  of  view,  Mr.  Symons 
has  often  been  very  penetrating  and  illuminating, 
and  he  might,  with  a  greater  expenditure  of  trouble, 
have  written  at  least  the  most  interesting  thing  about 
Baudelaire  in  English.  And  a  good  book  about 
Baudelaire  would  be  welcome. 

For  Baudelaire  was  one  of  the  most  fascinating 
personalities  of  his  century,  and,  historically,  one 
of  the  most  influential.  I  use  the  word,  of  course,  in 
a  restricted  sense.  The  large  public  never  heard  of 
him,  and  his  "  teaching  "  was  never  sufficiently 
coherent,  or  "  practical,"  or  "  social,"  to  inspire 
group  activity.  He  never  disseminated  drug  taking 
as  others  have  disseminated  vegetarianism  ;  no 
body  of  his  disciples  has  ever  instituted  the  system- 
atic worship  of  Satan  or  consumption  of  hashish  in 
any  Hampstead  Hothouse  Suburb  ;  and  the  devotees 
of  despair  remain  unorganised.  But  he  was  important 
both  as  symptom  and  as  agent.  In  him  there  came 
to  a  climax  that  romantic  pessimism  which  had 
wept  in  Werther  and  raved  in  Manfred,  and  brought 
gall  to  the  lips  of  some  of  his  French  predecessors  ; 
and  there  was  something  in  him  which  was  in  none 
of  the  others.  He  was  the  father  of  the  later  deca- 
dence, and  much  greater  than  any  of  his  children. 
Classifications  apart,  his  literary  influence  has  in- 
disputably been  immense.  His  disciples  have  come 
to  him  one  by  one  in  the  solitude  of  their  own 
chambers,  but  those  who  bear  his  marks  are  found 
in  all  civiHsed  countries,  and  have  included  many 

40 


BAUDELAIRE 

of  the  most  conspicuous  men  of  their  age.  Verlaine, 
Mallarme,  Rimbaud,  Samain,  Huysmans,  in  France  : 
Swinburne,  Wilde,  Beardsley,  in  England  :  these 
are  only  a  few  remembered  casually  of  the  swarm 
whose  thought  and  language  have  borne  those  un- 
mistakable stigmata.  It  is  possible  to  be  affected  by 
his  thought,  and  then  to  cast  off  the  sinister  enchant- 
ment ;  it  is  possible  to  read  him  without  being 
infected  by  his  pessimism  at  all.  But  it  is  impossible 
to  read  him  and  forget  him,  to  hear  his  accents  with- 
out sometimes  echoing  them,  to  turn  away  with 
indifferent  eyes  from  his  powerful  and  mysterious 
personality.  It  is  not  the  actual  events  of  his  life 
that  exert  this  sway.  His  career  was  no  pageant.  He 
was  an  affectionate  son,  he  had  a  long  and  wretched 
attachment  to  a  stupid  woman  of  colour,  he  trans- 
lated Poe,  wrote  for  the  newspapers,  despised 
women,  hated  Belgians  and  material  progress,  was 
a  slave  to  hashish,  and  died  terribly  :  there  is  little 
more  to  be  said.  His  power  resided  within  himself 
and  in  the  poems  which  came  nearest  to  being  an 
expression  of  himself.  As  man  and  artist  he  was 
wholly  unlike  anybody  else. 

It  is  commonly  said  that  Romanticism  is  dis- 
tinguished by  the  desire  for  "  escape  "  :  that  "  Over 
the  hills  and  far  away  "  is  the  phrase  which  best 
expresses  the  romantics  of  all  ages  and  the  whole 
romantic  movement  of  the  last  century.  That  passion 
was  present  in  Baudelaire  in  its  intensest  form  ;  but 
peculiarly.  He  did  not,  as  did  some  of  our  Pre- 
Raphaehtes,  turn  his  back  on  the  contemporary 
world.  He  looked  hard  and  long  at  it  ;  he  saw  it 
vile  and  filthy,  and  described  the  foulness  he  saw 

41 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

with  dreadful  realism.  He  was  not  one  of  those  who 
avoid  Hfe  and  find  happiness  by  lapping  themselves 
in  dreams  of  things  more  beautiful  and  serene, 
countries  of  content  beyond  the  horizon  and  ages 
golden  through  the  haze  of  time.  He  hankered  rather 
than  escaped.  He  was  perpetually  longing  for  some- 
thing "  remote  from  the  sphere  of  our  sorrow,"  but 
he  could  never  surrender  himself  to  a  vision  of  it  ; 
for  his  eyes  were  open,  and  he  saw  a  horrible  world 
and  a  black  universe,  terribly  anarchic  or  terribly 
governed.  When  he  was  a  young  man  he  made  a 
voyage  to  the  East,  and  the  memories  of  it  haunted 
him  all  his  hfe.  The  hot  blue  skies,  the  basking 
islands,  the  brown  girls,  the  ships  lying  under  the 
palm  trees,  the  odours  of  spice  and  of  brine  :  they 
recur  in  his  work  continually  as  symbols  of  all  things 
unattainable.  But  we  may  be  sure  that  when  he  was 
in  the  East  he  got  little  consolation  from  them,  and 
he  was  sure  of  it  himself.  In  one  of  his  prose  poems 
(I  quote  Mr.  Symons's  own  old  and  excellent  trans- 
lation) he  traversed  the  whole  world  in  imagination, 
and  it  all  turned  to  dust  and  ashes.  ''  Life,"  he  said, 
'*  is  a  hospital,  in  which  every  patient  is  possessed 
by  the  desire  of  changing  his  bed.  ...  It  seems  to 
me  that  I  should  always  be  happy  if  I  were  some- 
where else."  But  he  offers  his  soul  Holland,  and 
Lisbon,  and  the  Baltic,  and  the  Indies,  and  his  soul 
remains  unresponsive.  In  the  end  :  "At  last  my 
soul  bursts  into  speech,  and  wisely  she  cries  to  me, 
'  Anywhere,  anywhere,  out  of  the  world.'  " 

His  spirit  had,  he  knew,  the  power  of  poisoning 
all  that  it  contemplated.  He  was,  he  said  in  one  of 
his  poems,  the  peer  of  Midas  ;   he  could  turn  gold 

42 


BAUDELAIRE 

into  dross  and  built  sarcophagi  in  the  gleaming  fields 
of  heaven.  He  was  endowed  at  birth  with  a  passion 
for  "  the  place  where  you  shall  never  be  ;  the  lover 
whom  you  shall  never  know  "  ;  his  Hfe  was  spent 
in  the  pursuit  of  a  Beauty  defiined  by  himself  as 
inaccessible.  Yet  there  the  passion  was.  He  might, 
in  life,  vainly  attempt  to  distract  himself  with  every 
vice.  He  might  talk  blasphemy  about  God  and 
cynicism  about  human  love.  He  might  expend  all 
the  resources  of  his  unique  art  on  the  description 
of  the  repellent  objects  which  fascinated  him.  He 
might  peer  into  every  forbidden  room,  and  defile 
every  altar.  He  might  walk,  in  the  flesh  or  in  im- 
agination, through  the  most  sterile  of  deserts  and 
the  most  fetid  of  marshes,  through  all  the  disordered 
nightmares  of  the  drug,  and  all  the  squalid  byways 
of  the  human  city,  taverns,  and  brothels,  and  rain- 
soaked  cemeteries  ;  he  might  profess  indifference 
to  pain  and  admiration  for  evil  ;  but  he  could  never 
kill  his  unsatisfied  heart,  and,  above  the  confusion, 
he  could  alw^ays  perceive  the  glimmer  of  virtue  and 
love  and  peace  beyond  his  reach  : 

Des  Cieux  Spirituels  I'inaccessible  azur. 

Pour  rhomme  terrasse  qui  reve  encore  et  souffre, 

S'ouvre  et  s'enfonce  avec  I'attirance  du  gouffre. 

Neither  physical  debauchery  nor  philosophic 
diabolism  could  long  distract  him  from  the  un- 
attainable ideal,  and  it  is  this  which  is  one  of  the 
chief  sources  of  his  undiminished  power  of  com- 
manding men's  attention  and  even  affection.  It  is 
easy  enough    to    detect    pose    or    feebleness  in  the 

43 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

ordinary  decadent  ;  and  Baudelaire's  own  works 
have  made  thousands  of  such.  We  are  tempted  to 
say  to  them,  '*  Stop  this  nonsense,"  or  "  Take  some 
heahhy  exercise,"  and  conceive  their  cases  as  suffi- 
ciently dealt  with.  Baudelaire  cannot  be  dismissed 
like  that.  It  is  not  possible  to  despise  him,  and  we 
are  not  able  to  suppose  that  he  failed  to  understand 
anything  :  he  did  not  pose,  there  was  no  medicine 
for  him,  and  he  was  as  familiar  with  the  thoughts 
of  others  as  with  his  own.  Fifty  years  after  his  death 
he  still  speaks  in  the  portrait  printed  in  the  common 
edition  of  his  poems.  We  see  those  dark  liquid  pene- 
trating eyes  looking  out  from  under  the  contem- 
plative forehead,  the  wide  shut  mouth,  the  pouting 
under  lip.  There  is  pride  in  it  that  tells  us  we  are 
to  expect,  in  conversation,  no  confessional  flow,  no 
appeal  for  pity  ;  nothing  but  courteous,  precise, 
ironic  sentences,  acute  brief  analyses,  observations 
slightly  tinged  with  a  bitter  humour.  But  the  soul 
in  reserve  is  evident  in  the  fixed,  ardent,  melancholy 
look.  He  suffered  and  he  was  strong.  When  he  died 
of  general  paralysis,  locked  up  in  a  body  without 
speech,  his  condition  was  an  image  of  his  whole  Hfe. 
He  was  always  a  prisoner  beyond  reach  of  human 
contact,  and  the  lips  in  his  portrait  seem  to  say  that 
wherever  he  may  find  himself  he  will  be  the  same 
on  earth  or  in  interstellar  space,  in  heaven  or  in  hell, 
a  wanderer,  a  solitary  and  an  aHen.  There  was  power 
in  him,  the  power  of  a  great  personality  ;  but  his 
strength  was  strangely  manifested.  There  is  a  story 
by  himself  with  a  hero  whose  impotence  was  *'  so 
vast  "  that  it  was  "  epic." 

His  one  resource — it  can  be  explained  no  more 

44 


BAUDELAIRE 

and  no  less  in  him  than  in  any  other — was  his  art, 
and  his  genius  as  an  artist  was  so  extraordinary 
that  his  influence  would  still  have  been  great  had 
his  character  and  ''  subject-matter  "  lacked  their 
pecuHar  qualities.  He  wrote  impeccable  prose  ;  but 
his  verse,  for  compactness,  for  accuracy,  for  music, 
cannot  be  surpassed.  He  may  not  be  ranked  with 
the  world's  greatest  poets  :  humanity  will  scarcely 
concede  that  to  a  man  w^hose  principal  work  was 
labelled  (not  without  reason)  ''  Flow^ers  of  Evil," 
and  who  was  successfully  prosecuted  for  obscenity  : 
apart  from  which,  volume  of  work  and  universality 
of  appeal  are  bound  to  count  in  such  matters.  But 
there  certainly  never  was  a  poet  who  said  with  more 
perfection  what  he  had  to  say,  who  had  fewer  weak 
hnes  or  otiose  words,  who  was  more  consistently 
near  his  own  highest  level  of  achievement.  His  sense 
of  form  was  like  that  of  the  great  masters  in  marble 
and  bronze,  and  he  worked  like  a  slave  in  his  narrow 
field,  watering  it  with  his  sweat  "  pour  extorquer 
quelques  epis."  Here,  at  any  rate,  his  influence 
cannot  but  have  been  salutary.  If  the  Symbolists 
trace  to  him  the  origins  of  their  "  correspondences" 
and  their  mystical  minglings  of  the  senses,  the  Par- 
nassians were  certainly  as  much  in  his  debt  for  the 
example  he  set  of  artistic  self-discipline.  To  read  him 
is  to  contract  a  disgust  with  looseness  and  diffuse- 
ness.  It  is  perhaps  significant  that  the  memorial  ode 
which  the  young  Swinburne  wrote  on  him  was  the 
most  clear,  vivid,  and  truly  classic  of  all  Swinburne's 
poems. 


45 


KEATS 

JOHN  KEATS  died  in  1821.  He  was  born  on 
October  31,  1795,  ^^^  father  then  working  in 
a  H very-stable  in  Finsbury  Pavement.  His  parents 
died  before  he  left  school.  He  entered  at  Guy's, 
became  a  dresser  there  when  he  was  twenty,  met 
Hunt,  Haydon,  and  Shelley  in  the  same  year,  and 
published  his  first  volume  when  he  was  twenty- 
one.  "  Endymion  "  appeared  when  he  was  twenty- 
two,  '*  Lamia  "  and  the  "  Odes  "  when  he  was 
twenty-four.  He  died  at  Rome  of  consumption  at 
twenty-five,  and  his  death  was  noticed  in  "  Black- 
wood "  as  thc:-^  of  *'  a  young  man  who  had  left  a 
decent  calling  for  the  melancholy  trade  of  Cockney- 
poetry." 

Throughout  the  last  hundred  years  Keats 's  repu- 
tation has  steadily  grown.  There  were  those  among 
his  friends  who  realised  when  he  was  alive  that  he 
was  a  poet  of  extraordinary  powers.  That  is  in  the 
natural  course  of  things  ;  for  in  spite  of  the  common 
delusion  to  the  contrary,  and  the  obvious  truth  that 
great  writers  often  take  many  years  to  impress  the 
ruck  of  critics  and  attract  the  general  literary  public, 
the  records  show  that,  at  a  very  early  stage  in  their 
careers,  they  may  usually  rely  on  recognition  from 
a  few,  and  especially  from  their  colleagues.  Leigh 
Hunt  notoriously  admired  Keats  ;  Shelley,  if  he 
did  not  fully  understand  him,  died  with  "  Lamia  " 
at  his  breast  ;  Lamb  met  him  and  told  Crabb 
Robinson  that  he  put  '*  St.  Agnes'  Eve  "  next  to 
Wordsworth.  There  is  surely  something  significant 

46 


KEATS 

in  the  fact  that  he  should,  at  so  early  an  age,  have 
drifted,  however  casually,  into  the  society  of  these 
men  and  others  as  eminent.  They  differed  about 
his  early  performances,  but  they  felt  instantly  in 
him  a  candidate  for  immortaHty.  Outside  recognition 
was  certainly  slow.  Tennyson  and  his  circle  at 
Cambridge  proclaimed  his  greatness  as  far  as  their 
voices  could  carry,  which  was  not  very  far.  He  had 
been  dead  nineteen  years  when  the  first  "  collected  " 
reprint  appeared,  and  this  went  into  remainders. 
Yet  it  did  appear,  and  with  the  success  of  Lord 
Houghton's  edition  of  1848  came  the  evident  ful- 
filment of  his  quiet  prophecy  :  "I  think  I  shall  be 
among  the  English  poets  after  my  death." 

The  view  was  not,  however,  as  yet  general  that 
he  might  possibly,  had  he  lived,  have  been  the 
greatest  English  poet  after  Shakespeare.  Tennyson 
repeatedly  said  this,  but  it  was  not  common  doctrine, 
Attention  for  many  years  was  largely  centred  on  the 
things  which  he  did  supremely  well ;  the  things  com- 
pleted and  perfected,  "  Isabella,"  "  St.  Agnes' Eve," 
the  "  Odes,"  a  few  sonnets  and  songs,  the  finest  pas- 
sages from  the  longer  works.  His  character  as  a  poet 
was,  as  it  were,  fixed  by  these  ;  he  excelled  in  visual- 
isation, in  a  languorous  music,  in  richness  of  imagery ; 
for  ideas,  for  philosophy,  for  doctrine,  for  contem- 
plation of  the  nature  and  destiny  of  man  in  general, 
as  for  the  study  of  men  in  particular,  we  must  go 
elsewhere.  These  were  not  for  Keats,  who  preferred 
Greek  legends  and  autumn  leaves,  musical  sighs,  a 
sweet  melancholy,  and  the  shining  of  moonlight 
through  a  window  dyed  azure  and  gules.  This  view 
arose,  as  we  have  said,  through  too  exclusive  a  study 

47 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

of  his  acknowledged  masterpieces  ;  more  recently, 
the  examination  of  his  outlying  works  and  of  his 
letters  has  produced  a  general  tendency  to  speculate 
on  what  he  might  have  done  rather  than  to  describe 
what  he  actually  did.  Not  everybody  has  been  con- 
vinced by  the  South  African  professor  who  has  dis- 
covered a  profound  and  comprehensive  philosophical 
system  hiding  like  a  mighty  stone  temple  within 
the  tangled  greenery  of  "  Endymion  "  ;  but  there 
is  no  need  to  go  chasing  after  allegories  to  become 
apprised  of  the  fact  that  Keats  had  the  attributes 
of  an  original  and  masculine  thinker.  His  curiosity 
and  his  strong  common  sense  are  shown  everywhere 
in  his  correspondence,  and  the  later  ''  Hyperion  " 
is  the  work  of  a  "  world-poet  "  trying  his  mighty 
wings.  He  might,  it  is  now  conceded,  have  written 
on  the  Miltonic  scale  with  the  Miltonic  force, 
though  it  does  not  seem  likely  that  he  would  have 
driven  home  the  Miltonic  conclusions.  He  had  a 
natural  interest  both  in  metaphysics  and  in  ethics, 
though  he  was  not  in  the  habit  of  employing  those 
words  ;  and  the  combination  of  qualities,  mental 
and  physical,  in  him  was  so  rich  and  peculiar  that 
had  he  produced  ''  serious  "  works  on  the  major 
themes  they  would  have  been  very  unUke  anyone 
else's.  As  it  was,  he  had  just  developed  (to  use  his 
own  phrase)  the  '*  large  utterance  of  the  early  gods," 
when  he  died,  having  scarcely  had  the  use  of  it.  This 
truth  is  now  accepted,  it  may  even  be  that  it  has 
been  overstated  :  and  it  is  not  only  the  seeds  of  a 
great  philosophic  poet,  a  sunnier  Lucretius,  that 
they  have  found  in  him.  Critics  of  our  own  day  have 
also  argued  that  only  time  was  needed  to  make  him 

48 


KEATS 

one  of  the  noblest  of  poetic  dramatists.  The  con- 
tention is  based  solely,  but  not  altogether  unreason- 
ably, on  the  impressive  fragment,  "  King  Stephen," 
which  moves  convincingly  and  contains  characters 
w^ho  are  strongly  and  surely  drawn  and  differentiated. 
All  Keats 's  "  potentiaHties  "  are  now^  studied  ;  no 
writer  who  ever  died  in  youth  has  ever  had  his 
promise  explored  with  more  wonder  or  more  praise. 
Nevertheless,  though  the  probable  greatness  of 
Keats 's  maturity  is  now  realised,  we  are  still  habitu- 
ally bhnd  to  the  peculiar  greatness  of  his  immaturity. 
We  are  accustomed  to  think  of  Keats,  Shelley,  and 
even  Byron  as  poets  of  the  Romantic  age  who  died 
equally  young.  There  is  something  to  be  said  as  to 
their  relative  chances  of  development  had  they  all 
lived  longer  ;  but  leaving  that  aside,  we  commonly 
forget  that  Keats  had  several  years  of  Hfe  fewer 
than  Shelley,  only  half  Shelley's  length  of  man- 
hood. Keats  died  at  twenty- five  ;  at  twenty- five  he 
had  created  all  that  body  of  work  which  we  have, 
and  established  the  most  widespread  and  fruitful 
poetic  influence  of  the  century.  His  poems,  less 
numerous  than  Shelley's  though  they  are,  are  com- 
pared with  his,  and  people  who  admire  both  are 
content  to  differ  about  their  respective  merits.  Sup- 
pose, though,  that  Shelley  had  died  at  twenty-five  ? 
There  would  have  been  no  ''  Cenci,"  no  "Adonais,  " 
no  "  Prometheus,"  no  "  Cloud,"  no  "  Skylark," 
no  "  Ode  to  the  West  Wind  "  ;  few  of  the  best 
lyrics  and,  of  the  longer  poems,  nothing  notable 
except  '*  Alastor  "  and  "  The  Revolt  of  Islam." 
Byron,  dying  at  twenty- five,  would  never  have 
begun  "  Don  Juan  "  ;  Milton,  had  he  died  at  Keats 's 

49  E 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

age,  would  be  known  to  us  only  by  **  Comus,'* 
"  L'Allegro,"  "  II  Penseroso,"  "  The  Ode  on  Christ's 
Nativity,"  and  a  few  minor  poems.  Of  all  the  great 
English  poets  only  Coleridge  had  written  the  larger 
part  of  his  best  work  before  his  twenty-sixth  birth- 
day, and  Shakespeare  himself,  so  far  as  our  very 
inadequate  knowledge  extends,  had  written  literally 
nothing  at  all,  and  almost  certainly  not  a  line  of  the 
plays  and  poems  which  we  know.  It  may  be  sug- 
gested that  the  more  sensuous  and  pictorial  kind  of 
poet  may  be  expected  to  produce  art  of  a  high  order 
at  an  earlier  age  than  other  men.  Whether  this  be  so 
or  not,  Keats  was,  in  fact,  not  one  of  several  equal 
prodigies,  but  a  prodigy  unparalleled  for  volume  of 
masterly  early  achievement. 

We  may,  therefore,  say  that  even  now  it  is  not 
universally  recognised  how  unique  was  his  promise 
and,  in  the  circumstances,  his  performance.  But 
that  he  was  potentially  one  of  the  greatest  of  all  poets 
is  a  commonplace,  and  our  own  time  has  also  seen 
the  dissipation  of  a  false  conception  of  his  character 
which  imputed  to  him  weaknesses  of  a  kind  which 
are  not,  and  cannot  be,  found  in  the  greatest  poets, 
though  they  may  be  found  in  many  poets  of  the 
second  order.  The  greatest  poets,  however  repug- 
nant we  may  find  some  of  them,  have  not  been 
cowardly  or  unmanly  :  but  for  generations  men 
thought  of  Keats  as  a  querulous  and  hyper-sensitive, 
indolent  and  luxurious,  invalid.  Byron's  uninformed 
jest  about  his  having  been  "  killed  off  by  one 
critique  "  was  for  long  current,  and  Shelley's  mar- 
vellous but  misleading  elegy  supplied  apparent 
confirmation.   It  is  now  clear  that   Keats  was  as 

50 


KEATS 

undisturbed  by  the  scurrilous  philistinism  of 
"  Blackwood  "  and  the  ''  Quarterly  "  as  we  should 
expect  a  poet  of  his  powers  to  be,  except  in  so  far 
as  he  feared  that  reviewers  might  prevent  him  from 
earning  money — a  mundane  consideration,  no  doubt, 
but  even  poets  want  their  breakfasts,  and  cannot 
always  obtain  them  on  credit.  When  this  slander 
had  been  finally  blown  away,  the  letters  to  Fanny 
Brawne  were  published,  and  hundreds  of  critics, 
including  the  austere  and  self-contained  Mr.  Swin- 
burne, diffused  the  contempt  they  felt  for  a  young 
man  who  could  so  thoroughly  abandon  himself  to 
his  passions.  "  Fulsome  and  Hquorish  endearments"  : 
thus  spake  the  author  of  "  Anactoria  "  concerning 
some  of  Keats 's  less  happy  Unes,  and  of  the  letters 
he  said  : 

While  admitting  that  neither  his  love  letters, 
nor  the  last  piteous  outcries  of  his  wailing  and 
shrieking  agony,  would  ever  have  been  made 
pubUc  by  merciful  or  respectful  editors,  we  must 
also  admit  that,  if  they  ought  never  to  have  been 
published,  it  is  no  less  certain  that  they  ought 
never  to  have  been  written  ;  that  a  manful  kind 
of  man  or  even  a  manly  sort  of  boy,  in  his  love- 
making  or  in  his  suffering,  will  not  howl  and  snivel 
after  such  a  lamentable  fashion. 

"  He  lived  long  enough,"  was  Swinburne's  con- 
clusion, '*  only  to  give  promise  of  being  a  man." 

But  this  misconception  has  been  dissipated  Hke 
its  predecessor.  It  is  quite  true  that  the  sentences 
which    the    reviewers    quoted    from    Mr.    Buxton 

51 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Forman's  edition  to  the  horror  of  the  public  and 
Mr.  Swinburne  are  there  :  but  their  ''  piteousness  " 
and  grossness  have  both  been  absurdly  exaggerated. 
They  are  as  they  stand,  not  half  as  "  deplorable  " 
or  abnormal  as  they  were  made  out  to  be,  and  the 
worst  of  them  came  from  a  man  already  enveloped 
in  a  mortal  illness.  If  there  are  those  who  can  guaran- 
tee what  their  deportment  would  be  during  that 
slow  and  painful  approach  to  Death  which  may  be 
in  front  of  any  of  us,  I  can  only  say  I  envy  them  ; 
and  the  torment  was  very  great  for  Keats,  who  was 
dying  young,  with  his  ambitions  unfulfilled  and  his 
love  unsatisfied.  If  we  knew  nothing  of  him  beyond 
his  verse,  strength  of  character  could  be  deduced 
from  the  robust  power  and  serenity  of  parts  of  his 
verse  ;  but  all  the  evidence  we  have  confirms  the 
impression.  He  was,  when  in  health,  sociable, 
humorous,  sensible,  intellectually  adventurous  :  and 
he  gave  known  proofs  of  that  physical  courage  which 
may  be  the  unmistakable  manifestation  of  that  moral 
courage  with  which  it  is  often  falsely  contrasted. 

To  this  truth  after  a  century  his  countrymen  have 
at  last  come.  He  had,  most  obviously,  irritating 
faults  of  expression.  There  are  vulgarisms  in  his 
early  works  which  send  shudders  down  the  spines 
of  the  sensitive.  They  are  almost  all  of  one  kind  : 
they  occur  when  he  is  writing  of  women  and  love. 
Now  they  would  not  be  there,  it  may  be  admitted, 
had  not  Keats  had,  like  most  men  and  almost  all 
poets,  a  powerful  strain  of  sensuality.  But  what  is 
objected  to  is  not  really  his  morals  (which  are  often 
in  strongly  sensual  men  unexceptionable),  but  his 
manners  :    not  a  particular  grossness  in  him,  but 

52 


KEATS 

his  naive  and  uncultivated  way  of  confessing  his 
proclivities.  It  is  all  a  matter  of  words  :  we  do  not 
like  the  "  dalliance "  and  the  "  fondHng,"  the 
"  breasts  of  cream  "  and  "  gentle  squeezes,"  and, 
above  all  (to  quote  the  most  uncomfortable  line  from 
all  '*  Endymion  "),  "  those  Hps,  O  sUppery  blisses." 
To  some  extent  in  the  early,  though  not  in  the  later 
Keats,  we  feel  a  slightly  over-marked  preoccupa- 
tion ;  but  it  wouldn't  have  been  noticed  had  he 
learnt  reticence.  And  it  is  easy  to  guess  why  it  took 
him  so  long  to  shed  his  vulgarisms — for  that  is  what 
they  were.  The  Leigh  Hunt  circle,  valuable  as  its 
enthusiasm  was  to  him,  was  not  impeccable  in  its 
taste  ;  and  before  he  entered  that  circle  Keats  in 
all  likeHhood  kept  precisely  the  company  in  which 
refinement  in  certain  regards  w^ould  be  least  culti- 
vated. We  can  imagine  him  during  the  "  apothecary  " 
days  with  facetious  Dick  Swivellers  as  the  most 
enhghtened  of  his  acquaintance,  and  spending  much 
of  his  time  with  precocious  young  bucks  Hke  Mr. 
Smallweed,  who  ordered  his  chop  so  maturely  in 
Chancery  Lane,  while  casting  an  expert  glance  at 
the  barmaid.  Before  Keats  died  his  vocabulary  had 
become  civilised,  and  his  intellect  had  made  an 
advantageous  pact  with  his  senses.  An  article  on 
him  to-day  can  be  ended,  probably  without  sur- 
prising anyone,  with  an  extract  from  the  present 
Poet  Laureate  which  indicates  the  measure  of  the 
change,  in  Keats 's  regard,  which  has  come  over 
English  criticism.  ''  If,"  says  Mr.  Bridges  : 

I  have  read  him  rightly,  he  would  be  pleased, 
could  he  see  it,  at  the  universal  recognition  of 

53 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

his  genius  and  the  utter  rout  of  its  traducers  ; 
but  much  more  moved,  stirred  he  would  be  to 
the  depth  of  his  great  nature,  to  know  that  he  was 
understood,  and  that  for  the  nobility  of  his  char- 
acter his  name  was  loved  and  esteemed. 

But  what  Gifford  and  Jeffrey  would  think  is  beyond 
all  conjecture. 


I 

I 

\ 
54  i 


AUSTIN  DOBSON'S  ESSAYS 

MR.  AUSTIN  DOBSON*  has  throughout  his 
career  led  a  double  Ufe.  One  of  his  lives  has 
been  spent  in  our  own  age,  and  even,  to  a  large  ex- 
tent, in  the  Board  of  Trade.  The  other  has  been 
spent,  very  innocently,  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  it  is  scarcely  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  he  has 
as  many  acquaintances  in  the  eighteenth  century  as 
in  the  twentieth,  and  that  he  is  as  much  at  home 
with  those  as  with  these.  It  is  easy  enough  to  become 
familiar  with  the  outstanding  figures  of  the  Georgian 
era.  We  may  know  our  Burke  and  our  Gibbon,  our 
Goldsmith,  our  Gray,  our  Reynolds,  and  our 
Sheridan.  We  may,  through  Horace  Walpole  and 
Boswell,  establish  some  sort  of  contact  with  Con- 
way, Mason,  Mme.  du  Deffand,  and  the  Misses 
Berry,  with  Bennet  Langton,  Topham  Beauclerk, 
Mrs.  Thrale,  and  General  Paoli.  But  Mr.  Dobson 
has  penetrated  far  beyond  those  obvious  circles 
which  are  the  first  to  receive  the  casual  traveller. 
He  does  not  greatly  bother  about  the  foreground 
except  in  so  far  as  it  gives  clues  to  the  background. 
He  has  an  affection  for  those  who  were  persons  of 
some,  but  not  very  much,  importance  in  their  own 
day  ;  he  knows  his  way  about  a  variety  of  cultivated 
middle-class  homes  of  that  bygone  age  :  houses 
where  the  great  were  but  casual  visitors,  libraries  in 
which  intelligent  rentiers  wrote  treatises  on  syntax, 
boudoirs  in  which  young  ladies  composed  pre- 
cocious novels  or  wrote  sprightly  letters  to  their 

*   Mr.    D(jh:,on's    lamented    death    has    happened    since    this  was 
written. 

55 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

friends,  drawing-rooms  in  which  harpsichord  and 
flute  were  played  nightly  and  a  call  from  the  Mus- 
covite Ambassador  caused  an  immense  flutter.  He 
is  sufficiently  familiar  with  the  masterpieces  of  the 
age  ;  it  would  not  be  easy  to  stump  him  on  ''  Amelia" 
or  *'  Humphry  CHnker,"  or  "  Clarissa  Harlowe." 
But  others  do  justice  to  these,  and  Mr.  Dobson  pre- 
fers to  spend  his  time  among  the  neglected,  though 
never  among  the  stupid.  He  will  do  justice  to  the 
intelligent  doctor  whom  Dr.  Johnson  once  met  at 
Streatham,  or  the  Female  Sage  whom  Walpole 
casually  mentioned  to  Sir  Thomas  Mann.  He  will 
dig  out  their  works,  discover  their  letters,  pry  (if  he 
can)  into  their  diaries,  reconstruct  their  houses  and 
gardens,  recover  their  loves,  friendships,  ambitions, 
and  disappointments,  and,  in  the  end,  give  us  a 
picture  of  them  in  convincing  relation  to  their  con- 
temporary setting.  He  cannot  bear  to  think  that  a 
charming,  a  clever,  or  a  very  eccentric  person  should 
be  entirely  forgotten  ;  that  is,  one  who  belonged  to 
the  generation  towards  which  he  himself  is  tem- 
peramentally drawn  because  of  its  tastes,  its  manners, 
its  common-sense,  and  its  wit.  In  his  series  of  books 
on  the  eighteenth  century  he  has  drawn  a  large  gallery 
of  such  portraits,  and  he  is  now  so  familiar  with  his 
ground  that  the  mention  of  even  the  obscurest  of 
Georgian  worthies  at  once  brings  into  his  mind 
half-a-dozen  forgotten  persons  with  whom  *'  the 
deceased  "  was  probably  or  certainly  in  commu- 
nication. And  he  knows  something  instructive  or 
amusing  about  each  one  of  them. 

His  latest  volume  {Later  Essays,  1917-1920),  which 
appears    after    his    eighty-first    birthday,    contains 

56 


AUSTIN  DOBSON'S  ESSAYS 

six  long  essays  and  a  few  scraps  of  prose  re- 
flection and  metrical  epigram.  One  of  the  essays 
deals  with  the  Abbe  Edgeworth,  the  Irish  priest 
who  accompanied  Louis  XVI  on  the  flight  to 
Varennes  and  knelt  on  the  scaffold  over  his  head- 
less trunk.  The  subjects  of  four  of  the  others  are 
WilHam  Heberden,  "  Hermes  "  Harris,  '*  the  learned 
Mrs.  Carter,"  and  Thomas  Edwards.  It  would  be 
difficult  to  say  which  of  these  is  now  the  most  widely 
remembered,  if  such  a  term  can  be  appHed  to  any  of 
them.  I  suppose  EHzabeth  Carter,  who  was  one  of 
the  most  sensible  talkers  of  her  time,  was  a  blue- 
stocking without  being  a  prig,  wrote  several  toler- 
able poems  and  a  few  lines  that  deserve  preservation, 
and  made  a  translation  of  Epictetus,  which  had  a 
vogue  (for  such  were  the  proclivities  of  the  time)  like 
that  of  "  Reynard  the  Fox  "  or  ''  Kim  "  in  our  own 
time.  But  the  best-known  person  does  not  neces- 
sarily make  the  best  subject.  Harris  serves  Mr. 
Dobson  as  well  :  a  Wiltshire  gentleman,  an  amateur 
philologist,  and  father  of  that  Lord  Malmesbury 
who  brought  Queen  Caroline  over  to  the  Prince 
Regent,  to  be  received  as  if  she  were  something 
boring  to  the  point  of  being  nauseous.  Dr.  Heber- 
den's  career  as  physician  and  man  of  the  world  is 
very  typical  :  a  sort  of  parallel  to  Arbuthnot's, 
except  that  Heberden  had  no  literary  genius.  But 
Thomas  Edwards,  obscurer  still,  is  responsible  for 
an  essay  full  of  the  most  deHghtful  things.  He  was 
a  barrister  of  means,  a  friend  of  Richardson  and 
Hawkins  Browne  the  parodist  ;  and  his  little  fleet- 
ing fame  came  with  his  pamphlet  attacking  the  over- 
bearing bully  Bishop  Warburton,  the  rashest,  if  not 

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the  stupidest,  of  all  Shakespeare's  editors.  Many 
of  Edwards's  cunning  hits  are  recorded  here,  with  a 
mass  of  minute  information  about  his  private  life  : 
amongst  other  things  we  are  given  excerpts  from  his 
ironical  ''  Canons  of  Criticism,"  such  as  : 

I.  A  Professed  Critic  has  a  right  to  declare, 
that  his  Author  wrote  whatever  He  thinks  he 
ought  to  have  written  ;  with  as  much  positive- 
ness,  as  if  He  had  been  at  his  elbow. 

Vn.  He  may  find  out  obsolete  words,  or  coin 
new  ones  ;  and  put  them  in  the  place  of  such,  as 
He  does  not  like,  or  does  not  understand. 

IX.  He  may  interpret  his  Author  so  ;  as  to 
make  him  mean  directly  contrary  to  what  He  says. 

The  case  for  the  conjectural  emendation  has  never 
been  more  succinctly  put. 

This  resuscitation  of  ancient  gossip  is  always 
agreeable  ;  but  it  is  as  well  to  have  a  present  re- 
minder that  even  in  the  eighteenth  century  men 
differed,  and  that  the  conventional  picture  of  solid 
brick  houses,  Chippendale  and  chamber  music  is 
misleading.  Under  the  crust  was  Gin  Lane,  and 
Walpole's  excursions  around  his  bric-a-brac  were 
sometimes  rudely  interrupted  by  menacing  mul- 
titudes of  unemployed  "  weavers."  The  most  mem- 
orable of  these  papers  is  of  a  kind  less  frequently 
represented  in  Mr.  Dobson's  collections  :  it  deals 
with  the  career  of  a  great  and  an  effective  reformer. 
John  Howard,  ''  the  philanthropist  "  (since  Dickens 
and  Mrs.  Jellyby  nobody  applies  that  noble  name  to 
a  man  in  a  wholly  serious  and  compHmentary  way), 

58 


AUSTIN  DOBSON'S  ESSAYS 

was  not  the  sort  of  person  who  wrote  polemical  tracts 
about  Shakespeare,  who  translated  elevating  maxims 
from  the  ancients,  who  craned  his  neck  to  appraise 
the  ceilings  of  Angelica  Kauffmann,  or  who  assuaged 
his  melancholy  with  the  strains  of  the  German  flute. 
He  had,  it  is  true,  in  early  life  a  taste  for  pictures  ; 
but  once  he  had  become  convinced  of  the  need  for 
prison  reform  he  never  again  thought  of  anything 
but  prisons.  The  story  Mr.  Dobson  tells  is  the 
story  of  one  of  the  most  austere,  saintly,  *'  dedi- 
cated," and  systematically  vagrant  of  lives.  Howard 
was  an  upholsterer's  son,  who  inherited  a  com- 
petence. At  twenty-seven  he  married  his  elderly 
landlady  ;  she  died  two  years  later,  and,  grown 
restless,  he  wandered  through  Portugal  and  France. 
Returning,  he  became  a  member  of  the  Royal  Society, 
settled  in  Buckinghamshire  and  married  again.  He 
travelled  a  good  deal  (amongst  other  things  taking 
the  temperature  of  Vesuvius),  and  became  suffi- 
ciently prominent  in  his  rural  district  as  to  be  made 
High  Sheriff  of  his  county.  This  was  in  1773  ;  he 
was  forty-seven  ;  and  up  to  that  date  he  had  done 
so  little  that,  had  he  died  then,  nobody  now  living, 
excepting  Mr.  Dobson,  would  have  heard  of  him. 
But  his  duty  brought  him  into  contact  with  the  local 
gaol,  and  the  gaol  of  that  time  was  the  foulest  of 
foul  dens  : 

In  it,  young  and  old,  hale  and  sick,  pure  and 
impure,  innocent  and  guilty,  were  herded  and 
huddled,  without  distinction  or  occupation  ;  and 
here,  for  the  most  trivial  ofl'ences,  on  the  vaguest 
evidence,  they  were  detained  indefinitely,  in  order 

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to  satisfy  the  exorbitant  claims  for  fees  made  by 
rapacious  wardens  and  turnkeys.  They  were  ex- 
posed to  the  most  wanton  cruelty,  systematically 
starved,  savagely  punished,  and  ruthlessly  ex- 
posed to  the  horrors  of  infection.  Not  a  few  of 
them  became  imbecile  or  insane,  while  others 
succumbed  to  the  terrible  distemper  generated 
by  the  total  neglect  of  sanitary  precautions. 

From  that  time  to  his  death  Howard  spent  most 
of  his  time  scouring  the  prisons  and  pest-houses  of 
Europe  and  endeavouring,  through  Parliament  and 
the  Press  in  this  country  and  interviews  with  the 
great  abroad,  to  secure  their  reformation.  He  spared 
his  body  no  labours  ;  his  abstemiousness  was  such 
that  he  would  have  been  thoroughly  at  home  at  the 
table  of  John  the  Baptist.  The  things  he  saw  were 
revolting.  *'  His  very  notebook  grew  foul  and 
tainted."  *'  At  Nottingham  he  found  that  the  poorer 
prisoners  slept  in  damp  '  dug-outs  '  forty-seven 
steps  down,  cut  in  the  sandy  rock.  ...  At  Ely  it 
had  been  the  practice  to  chain  the  inmates  to  the 
floor  on  their  backs,  with  a  spiked  iron  collar  about 
their  necks,  and  a  heavy  bar  over  their  legs.  .  .  . 
At  Plymouth  there  were  two  small  chambers  for 
felons.  One  of  these — the  *  Clink  ' — ^was  solely 
lighted  and  ventilated  by  a  wicket  in  the  door,  seven 
inches  by  five,  and  to  this  contracted  breathing-hole 
the  prisoners  under  sentence  of  transportation  came 
by  turns  for  air."  It  sounds  a  ghastly  condemnation 
of  contemporary  civilisation  ;  but  it  was  true  of 
those  evils,  as  of  many,  that  few  people  were  enter- 
prising enough  to  discover  that  they  existed.  Howard 

60 


AUSTIN  DOBSON'S  ESSAYS 

shocked  the  public,  and  received  the  thanks  of  the 
House  of  Commons.  It  was,  as  usual,  some  time 
before  anything  effective  was  done,  and  after  the 
first  horror  had  passed  there  was  a  tendency  on  the 
part  of  the  authorities  to  take  the  will  to  reform  for 
the  deed.  But  the  reform  of  prison  hygiene  and 
discipline  in  this  country  (by  no  means  perfect 
yet)  dates  from  Howard,  and  his  activities  spread 
every\vhere,  from  Ireland  to  the  Urals.  He  repeatedly 
toured  Spain,  France,  the  Netherlands,  Germany, 
Switzerland,  and  Bohmeia  ;  protested  against  the 
iniquitous  "  Piombi  "  at  Venice  and  the  treatment 
of  prisoners  of  war  in  Dunkirk,  saw  the  knout 
used  in  Moscow,  and  caught  jail-fever  in  Lille. 
Forty-seven  thousand  miles  he  covered,  and  in 
1789,  enfeebled  and  sixty-three,  he  set  out  for 
his  last  journey  through  Europe  to  Russia.  His  name 
was  widely  known  and  honoured  ;  this  at  least  is  to 
the  credit  of  the  powers  of  his  day  that  they  threw 
every  prison  open  to  him,  and  welcomed  his  sug- 
gestions ;  and  the  influence  of  his  reputation  and 
personality  on  the  objects  of  his  soUcitude  was  such 
that  he  once  quelled,  unarmed  and  alone,  a  riot  of 
several  hundred  prisoners  who  had  murdered  their 
jailers.  At  the  close  of  1789  he  had  reached  Kherson, 
in  Russian  Tartary,  where  he  wished  to  inspect  the 
military  hospitals,  Russia  and  Turkey  being  at  war. 
He  had  sighed  occasionally  for  a  peaceful  old  age  in 
Buckinghamshire  ;  he  died  in  a  Russian  village,  and 
his  remains  were  followed  to  the  grave  "  by  some 
two  or  three  thousand  spectators,  an  escort  of  cavalry, 
and  a  crowd  of  carriages,  including  the  sumptuous 
equipage  of  the  Prince  of  Moldavia,  drawn  by  six 

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horses  covered  with  scarlet  cloth."  In  Stepanovka, 
a  white  pyramid  stands  over  his  grave.  In  St.  Paul's 
Cathedral  is  his  statue.  It  was  the  first  to  be  placed 
there,  and  represents  him  ''  in  a  classic  costume, 
with  shock  hair,  broken  shackles  at  his  feet,  and  a 
key  in  his  right  hand,"  and  rustics  are  reported  to 
have  mistaken  it  for  an  effigy  of  St.  Peter.  That 
career  and  that  statue  may  be  taken  as  representing 
symbohcally  the  relation  between  Hfe  and  art  in  the 
eighteenth  century.  They  loved,  feared,  and  broke 
their  hearts  ;  but  it  didn't  strike  them  to  put  it  into 
their  poetry.  They  adventured  and  died  Hke  men  : 
and,  commemorating  their  heroes,  they  reduced 
the  most  extraordinary  of  careers  to  a  marble  toga 
and  a  couple  of  dead  metaphors.  That  is  the  worst 
of  too  unmitigated  a  reign  of  *'  taste  "  :  but  it  has 
its  charms,  and  nobody  has  ever  appreciated  them 
more  exquisitely  than  Mr.  Austin  Dobson. 


62 


MR.  GEORGE  MOORE'S  TAPESTRY 

SOME  years  ago  Mr.  George  Moore,  deter- 
mined no  longer  to  court  the  insults  of  the 
library  censorship,  announced  his  intention  of  having 
his  future  books  privately  printed  and  issued  to 
subscribers.  The  new  era  has  seen  the  production 
of  several  books  very  agreeable  in  physical  appear- 
ance and  very  diverse  in  character.  ''  The  Brook 
Kerith  "  was  followed  by  "  A  Story-Teller's  Holi- 
day," in  which  one  delicious  and  beautiful  tale  was 
surrounded  by  others  which  had  little  point  beyond 
their  grossness,  and  that  by  ''  Avowals,"  one  of  the 
most  original  and  companionable  of  his  books.  A 
play  came  next,  and  now  we  have  a  novel  on  a  large 
scale,  in  which  he  has  retold  a  classic  story  of  love. 
He  is  nothing  if  not  enterprising  ;  who  would  have 
thought  to  hear  him  talking  mediaeval  history  and 
even  sprinkHng  his  pages  with  *'  alacks,"  "  withals," 
and  "  twains  "  ?  His  scene  is  Paris  in  the  early 
twelfth  century,  when  NominaUsts  and  Realists 
were  dividing  the  world  of  thought,  and  the  bold 
and  brilliant  young  philosopher  Abelard  was  acquir- 
ing an  influence  which  alarmed  the  clergy.  He  meets 
Heloise,  a  girl  fresh  from  a  convent,  Hving  with  her 
uncle,  a  Canon  of  Notre  Dame.  As  Paolo  and  Fran- 
cesca  came  together  over  their  book,  so  these  two 
do  over  Virgil  and  Ovid,  and  the  Chanson  de  Roland. 
They  elope.  They  part,  after  Heloise  has  conceived, 
because  she  wishes  him  to  enter  the  Church,  where 
alone  a  career  is  open  to  a  philosopher  as  great  as 
Plato.  The  uncle  insists  on  a  secret  marriage  ;  there 

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is  a  disingenuous  renouncement  of  wedlock  in  order 
that  Abelard  may  realise  his  ambitions,  which  do 
not  stop  short  of  the  Papacy ;  Heloise  goes  into  a 
nunnery,  consoled  at  times  by  the  presence  of  her 
son,  who  has  the  remarkable  name  of  Astrolabe  : 
she  w^aits  for  Abelard  for  nine  years  :  she  then 
hears  how  long  ago  her  uncle  had  him  seized  and 
mutilated  ;  they  meet  for  the  last  time  ;  and  they 
separate  to  know  no  more  of  each  other  except 
through  letters.  That  is  Mr.  Moore's  outline.  How 
has  he  filled  it  in  ? 

Meditating  on  Mr.  Moore's  book,  one  realises 
that  several  sorts  of  great  novel  might  have  been 
made  out  of  his  theme  and  his  period,  and  that 
hints  of  them  all  are  to  be  found  in  his  book.  The 
relics  of  the  twelfth  century  are  not  so  profuse  as 
those  of  the  fifteenth  ;  there  is  a  certain  lack  of 
materials  for  the  construction  of  a  vivid  picture  of 
life,  at  any  rate,  in  the  towns.  It  isn't  that  a  few 
anachronisms  matter  ;  I,  for  one,  had  Mr.  George 
Moore  mentioned  artichokes,  should  not  have  gone 
to  a  book  of  reference  to  see  if  artichokes  had  been 
introduced  into  France  at  that  date.  Yet  a  noveUst 
cannot  put  down  things  that  he  knows  to  be  absurd 
and  that  the  reader  will  know  to  be  absurd  ;  while 
years  of  ad  hoc  research  are  apt  to  deaden  the  creative 
impulse  and  result  in  a  catalogue.  Still,  a  man's 
imagination  might  be  captured  by  that  period,  and 
form  a  bright  and  detailed  picture  of  its  physical 
aspects  and  spiritual  movements.  ''  Ivanhoe  "  and 
"  The  Cloister  and  the  Hearth  "  were  worth  writ- 
ing. Any  good  picaresque  novel,  again,  is  a  fine 
thing  to   write  ;    a  novel,  whatever  its  period,  in 

64 


MR.  GEORGE  MOORE'S  TAPESTRY 

which  the  central  personage  or  group  passes  through 
a  variety  of  amusing  or  romantic  scenes,  and  en- 
counters a  variety  of  strange  people,  each  with  his 
peculiar  habits  and  his  store  of  tales  ;  a  "  Lavengro" 
of  the  twelfth  century,  well  done,  would  be  worth 
having.  Finally,  the  story  of  Abelard  and  Heloise, 
passionate  and  unfortunate  lovers,  with  the  added 
interest  of  being  very  intelligent,  might  make  one 
of  the  most  moving  books  in  the  world. 

Beyond  doubt  a  great  novel  is  conceivable  which 
should  have  elements  of  all  three.  Mr.  Moore's  has. 
It  is  a  blend,  and  the  mingling  is  cunningly  done, 
although  there  are  places  where  his  vagrant  tendency 
gets  a  Httle  too  much  the  upper  hand.  But  it  is  a  pale 
blend.  His  gallant  tapestry  is  well  woven,  of  good 
quality,  but  faded.  He  does  not  give  a  full  and  con- 
vincing picture  of  the  period,  much  as  he  talks  of 
the  Crusades  and  the  Church,  Nominalism  and 
Realism,  and  studious  though  he  is  to  mention 
troubadours  and  gleemen,  lepers  and  wolves.  These 
are  mentioned,  but  as  a  rule  they  are  not  clearly 
seen  or  in  their  force  felt.  No  swarming  scene  of 
action  remains  in  one's  memory  after  one  has  read 
the  novel  :  even  Paris  and  its  priests  and  students 
is  visualised  only  dimly  and  in  fragments  ;  the 
crowds  make  no  noise,  and  we  are  not  even  sure 
about  the  architecture.  The  wandering  part  of  the 
story,  again,  lacks  humour,  colour,  and  character. 
Abelard  and  Heloise,  with  the  servant  Madelon, 
make  a  long  journey  together,  by  forest  roads  to 
Orleans,  by  boat  to  Nantes.  Abelard  makes  another, 
first  alone,  and  then  in  company  with  his  old  master, 
a  ruined  Count.  A  large  part  of  France  is  traversed  ; 

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the  travellers  sleep  in  inns  and  houses  and  woods  ; 
they  encounter  all  weathers,  see  many  birds  and 
beasts  and  flowers  ;  they  converse  with  each  other, 
and  strike  many  companions  of  the  road,  gleemen, 
pedlars,  and  pardoners.  Everybody,  too,  tells 
stories  faintly  reminiscent  of  the  "  Fabliaux  "  and 
the  ''  Cent  Nouvelles  Nouvelles,"  not  to  mention 
the  "  Heptameron."  That  the  discursive  method 
suits  Mr.  Moore  nobody  who  has  read  his  volumes 
of  memoirs  needs  to  be  told.  But  he  has  not  suc- 
ceeded here.  His  pubHcans  and  pardoners  have  not 
the  life  of  his  Edward  Martyns  and  A.  E.s  ;  his 
suns  do  not  burn  and  his  rains  do  not  drench  ;  his 
landscapes  are  not  differentiated  ;  and  his  em- 
bedded anecdotes,  though  conducted  with  very 
great  skill,  lack  the  last  degree  of — ^well,  punch — 
the  author's  interest  in  them  apparently  warming 
only  on  the  few  occasions  on  which,  in  these  volumes, 
he  permits  himself  to  be  disgusting.  There  are 
amusing  and  beautiful  patches,  but  the  whole  is 
dullish.  And  with  what  is  after  all  his  main  concern, 
the  amours  of  Abelard  and  Eloisa,  he  cannot  be 
held  to  have  perfectly  succeeded.  There  are  two 
principal  reasons  for  this.  One  is  that  he  has  im- 
perfectly drawn,  if  not  imperfectly  apprehended, 
the  character  of  Abelard,  who  is  not  merely  a  puzzle, 
but  a  puzzle  which  does  not  excite  us  to  solution. 
His  Abelard  only  interests  us  because  Heloise  is 
interested  in  him,  and  seldom  at  that  ;  even  w^hen 
the  worst  calamities  befall  him  we  do  not  much 
mind  ;  here,  as  often  in  Mr.  Moore's  books,  one 
feels  that  the  author's  women  characters  attract 
him  more  than  his  m.en. 

66 


MR.  GEORGE  MOORE'S  TAPESTRY 

But  another  reason  of  the  love-story's  faihire  to 
hold  us  is  that  there  is  an  inadequate  stress  laid 
upon  the  more  significant  parts  of  it.  Now  and  again 
there  are  sentences  of  a  tender  beauty  and  analytic 
passages  of  some  subtlety,  but  passion,  if  often  re- 
ferred to,  is  never  made  fully  evident.  The  crises 
of  emotion  are  not  communicated  to  the  reader  ; 
over  everything  Mr.  Moore  ambles  smoothly  on  ; 
the  tone  of  the  sentences  does  not  vary,  whatever 
their  content  ;  one  thing  comes  after  another  and 
we  turn  the  pages  with  unruffled  equanimity.  So  it 
comes  to  pass  that,  reading  again  what  should  be 
one  of  the  powerfully  affecting  of  all  the  true  stories 
in  the  world,  one  is  very  seldom  conscious  of  the 
faintest  wing-touch  of  suffering,  we  are  infinitely 
less  grieved  and  elated  than  we  have  been  by  the 
mere  fairy-tale  of  '*  Aucassin  and  Nicolette."  It  is 
a  half-realised  tale  of  old  unhappy  far-off  things  ; 
the  age  and  the  distance  are  miore  noticeable  than 
the  unhappiness  ;  it  is  stretched  out  to  thinness. 
The  inadequacy  of  Mr.  Moore's  treatment  is  all 
the  more  annoying  because  his  invention  of  incident 
has  not  failed.  Time  after  time  he  brings  us  to  a 
place  where  he  might  have  wTitten  a  memorable 
page,  and  always  he  skims  over  the  great  moment 
in  a  polished  conversational  way.  One  does  not  ask 
him  to  "  lay  it  on  too  thick  "  ;  but  restraint  is  one 
thing,  and  the  apparent  absence  of  anything  to  re- 
strain is  another. 

Were  the  book  written  by  anyone  but  a  man  of 
genius,  I  should  not  have  elaborated  the  case  against 
it  like  that.  I  do  not  wish  to  convey  the  impression 
that  it  sent  me  to  sleep,  or  to  suggest  that  it  has  not 

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great  merits.  Heloise  frequently  comes  to  life. 
There  are  delightful  scenes  in  her  uncle's  house  at 
Paris,  and  again  in  the  convent  to  which  she  retires, 
after  losing  her  husband  ;  and  intermittently  we 
feel  her  pangs  :  above  all,  during  those  long  years 
of  separation,  when  she  did  not  even  know  where 
Abelard,  immured  above  the  grey  sea  of  Brittany, 
w^as,  and  talked  absent-mindedly  to  the  nuns,  was 
troubled  about  her  child,  and  woke  from  restless 
sleep  to  *'  sit  up  in  bed  scared,  watching  the  grey 
window  pane."  Some  of  the  minor  characters, 
especially  the  fat  and  selfish  Canon,  are  well  done  ; 
there  is  grace  and  interest  in  certain  of  the  dis- 
quisitions on  theology  and  metaphysics  ;  and  above 
all,  there  is  Mr.  Moore's  prose  style.  The  book  may 
be  monotonously  written,  but  so  high  a  level  of 
monotony  has  never  been  reached.  We  may  some- 
times miss  the  right  word,  but  we  are  never  acutely 
conscious  of  the  wrong  one.  By  long  labour  Mr. 
Moore  has  arrived  at  a  simplicity  of  diction  and 
phrase  which  is  a  true  simplicity  ;  he  has  discovered 
his  natural  method  of  expression  and  shed  the  ac- 
quired ;  every  sentence  comes  easily  and  flows  into 
the  next  ;  it  is  a  stream  of  perfect  talk.  Even  the 
least  arresting  and  most  rambling  of  his  pages  is 
unmistakably  the  work  of  an  artist  in  prose  and  may 
arouse  envy  by  virtue  of  its  easy  elegance  of  move- 
ment and  purity  of  language. 

And  it  would  be  absurd  not  to  add  a  tribute  to 
the  energy,  witness  of  a  rare  devotion  to  his  art, 
which  produced  a  book  so  elaborate  and  so  ambitious 
when  the  author  has  reached  an  age  at  which  most 
novelists  are  content  to  make  dabbling  efforts  to 

68 


MR.  GEORGE  MOORE'S  TAPESTRY 

repeat  their  former  successes.  It  is  the  biggest  job 
Mr.  Moore  has  ever  attempted  to  tackle,  and  the 
very  great  labour  of  its  composition  must  have  been 
preceded  and  accompanied  by  a  considerable  labour 
of  research.  Failure  though  the  book  may  be,  one 
instinctively  judges  it  by  the  highest  standards. 
And  it  leaves  me  with  the  feeling  that  Mr.  Moore's 
best  book  may  be  yet  to  come,  so  active  is  still  his 
mind  and  so  unquenched  his  desire  to  excel  his  feats 
of  craftsmanship.  But  if  it  does  come  I  suspect  that 
it  will  not  be  a  book  with  a  great  theme  appeaUng 
to  the  deeper  feeUngs,  but  the  book  of  a  raconteur, 
an  audacious  humorist,  a  connoisseur  in  art,  nature, 
and  the  emotions,  a  man  who  by  this  time  ought  to 
know  himself  more  akin  to  Boccaccio  and  Watteau 
than  to  Shakespeare  or  Dickens.  One  cannot  help 
admiring  the  perverse  pride  of  one  who  continues 
in  a  wish  to  do  something  which  he  has  not  done 
before,  but  Mr.  Moore  was  not  made  to  be  a  great 
romantic  writer.  Happily  he  discovered  long  ago 
that  he  was  made  for  something  better  than  a 
"  realistic  "  writer. 


69 


ANDREW  MARVELL 

THE  city  of  Hull  is  to  celebrate  the  tercen- 
tenary of  the  birth  of  Andrew  Marvell,  who 
represented  Hull  in  Parhament  from  1659  till  his 
death  in  1678.  Marvell  was  a  son  of  the  Rev. 
Andrew  Marvell,  rector  of  Winestead,  who  became 
master  of  the  Hull  Grammar  School  in  1624.  The 
younger  Andrew  was  taught  by  his  father,  went  to 
Cambridge  in  1633  as  a  Sizar  of  Trinity,  and  in  1638 
was  admitted  a  Scholar.  In  1641,  or  thereabouts, 
he  went  off  for  a  four  years'  tour  on  the  Continent. 
He  seems  during  the  early  portion  of  the  Civil  War 
to  have  mixed  in  Royalist  circles  ;  but  the  temper 
which  inspired  his  famious  eulogy  of  Charles  I  on 
the  scaffold,  embedded  in  a  congratulatory  ode  to 
Cromwell,  saved  him  from  discomfort  without  in- 
volving him  in  dishonour.  From  1650  till  1652  he 
was  tutor  to  Fairfax's  daughter  Mary  at  the  General's 
country  seat,  and  in  the  latter  year  he  was  recom- 
mended b}^  Milton  (who  had  gone  blind)  as  assistant 
Latin  (Foreign)  Secretary.  He  obtained  the  position 
in  1657.  Next  year  we  hear  of  his  being  given  six 
yards  of  mourning  on  Cromwell's  death  ;  in  1659 
he  was  elected  member  for  Hull ;  on  the  Restora- 
tion in  1660  he  not  merely  did  not  suffer  because 
of  his  support  of  the  Protector,  but  was  largely  in- 
strumental, by  vigorous  lobbying,  in  saving  Milton 
from  Tyburn  or  the  gaol.  In  1663  he  went  with 
Lord  Carlisle  on  a  mission  to  Scandinavia  and 
Russia  ;  he  published  several  political  and  religious 
tracts  ;  and  he  died  in  1678. 

70 


ANDREW  MARVELL 

Certain  of  his  verses  had  come  out  as  pamphlets. 
The  more  polemic  of  them  had  to  wait.  But  he  left 
a  widow  of  whom  the  one  thing  we  know  is  that  she 
at  once  set  herself  after  his  death  to  collect  all  his 
non-satirical  poems.  They  came  out  in  1681,  in  a 
folio  with  a  portrait.  Verses  of  another  kind  were  at 
last  printed  and  attributed  to  him  in  the  "  State 
Poems  "  in  WiUiam's  reign,  and  in  1726  Thomas 
Cooke  pubHshed  a  two- volume  collection.  But  it 
is  not  to  Cooke  that  Grosart  and  Aitken,  Marvell's 
latest  editors,  have  looked  for  authority.  The  basic 
edition  of  Marvell  w^as  that  produced  in  1776  by  a 
collateral  descendant.  Captain  Thompson.  This 
useful  and  enthusiastic  mariner  had  a  manuscript 
book  containing  several  fine  unpubHshed  poems, 
and  he  printed,  besides  the  poems,  Marvell's  corre- 
spondence with  the  Hull  Corporation,  and  also  his 
prose  WTitings.  We  have  in  the  history  of  Marvell's 
works  a  story  in  which  his  city  may  rightly  pride 
itself.  For  both  Thompson,  Marvell's  first  important 
editor,  and  Aitken,  his  last,  were  Hull  men.  But  the 
Mayor  and  Corporation  of  1670  would  be  surprised 
could  they  hear  that  their  cheerful  little  red-faced 
member  is  chiefly  remembered  as  a  delicate  lyrist. 

Most  of  Marvell's  best  poems  w^ere,  it  is  supposed, 
written  before  the  Restoration — many  of  them 
v/hile  he  was  tutor  to  Fairfax's  daughter.  Almost  all 
are  in  octosyllabic  couplets,  a  kind  of  verse  in  which, 
at  his  best,  he  is  excelled  by  no  English  poet. 
"  Where  the  remote  Bermudas  ride  "  is  a  poem 
perfect  in  form  and  unique  in  kind  :  as  a  rule  he 
was  best  when  in  a  garden  or  a  meadow,  or 
writing  Hght  pastoral  dialogues  or  tender  epitaphs. 

71 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Everybody  knows  the  garden  poem  containing  the 

lines  : 

Annihilating  all  that's  made 

To  a  green  thought  in  a  green  shade, 

lines  which  precede  two  of  the  loveliest  and  most 
dexterously  simple  stanzas  in  all  literature.  But  the 
gardens  are  all  over  his  book.  The  whole  of  the  long 
poem  "  Upon  Appleton  House  "  is  full  of  the  scent 
of  flowers,  and  the  fertility  of  his  Hght  fancy  was 
inexhaustible.  Take  this  description  of  a  soldier's 
garden  as  a  model  of  extreme  artificiality  which  is 
not  allowed  to  smother  reality  : 

See  how  the  flowers,  as  at  parade, 

Under  their  colours  stand  displayed  ; 

Each  regiment  in  order  grows. 

That  of  the  tulip,  pink,  and  rose. 

But  when  the  vigilant  patrol 

Of  stars  walks  round  about  the  pole. 

Their  leaves  that  to  the  stalks  are  curled 

Seem  to  their  staves  the  ensigns  furled. 

Then  in  some  flower's  beloved  hut, 

Each  bee,  as  sentinel,  is  shut. 

And  sleeps  so,  too,  but,  if  once  stirred. 

She  runs  you  through,  nor  asks  the  word. 

His  rhythms  are  as  smooth  as  possible,  and  he  will 
go  for  many  lines  without  inversions,  in  a  sort  of 
inspired  conversational  way.  And  his  nature  was 
not  conventional  nature.  He  saw  things  for  himself. 
Lines  like — 

And  through  the  hazels  thick  espy 
The  hatching  throstle's  shining  eye, 

72 


ANDREW  MARVELL  i 

which  are  rare  in  our  Carohne  poetry,  are  common  ■ 

in  Marvell.  The  marks  of  his  period  are  to  be  found 
in  occasional  conceits  and  tropes.  Having  been 
communing  with  birds  and  plants,  he  has  grown  so 
close  to  them  that  he  says  : 

Give  me  but  wings  as  they  ;   and  I  | 

Straight  floating  on  the  air  shall  fly  ; 

Or  turn  me  but,  and  you  shall  see 

I  was  but  an  inverted  tree.  i 

Describing  a  hospital  mansion  that  has  no  archi- 
tectural grandeur,  he  ventures  : 

A  stately  frontispiece  of  poor 
Adorns  without  the  open  door  ; 
Nor  less  the  rooms  within  commends 
Daily  new  furniture  of  friends. 

This  was  of  the  time,  but  more  frequently  Marvell 

reminds  us  of  a  later  time.  '*  The  Picture  of  Little 

T.  C.  in  a  Prospect  of  Flowers  "  has  often  been 

compared  to  the  similar  composition  of  Prior.  In 

many  descriptive  passages  we  are  reminded  of  Gay  i 

at  his  best.  For  example  : 

Oh,  what  a  pleasure  'tis  to  hedge 

My  temples  here  with  heavy  sedge  ; 

Abandoning  my  lazy  side,  i 

Stretched  as  a  bank  into  the  tide  ;  j 

Or  to  suspend  my  sUding  foot 

On  the  osier's  undermined  root,  ; 

And  in  its  branches  tough  to  hang  i 

While  at  my  Hne  the  fishes  twang.  ' 

73 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

There  is  very  little  passion  in  his  poetry,  but 
much  affection  :  no  majesty,  but  much  grace. 
Innocence  and  Quiet  were  his  Muses  ;  looking 
both  at  fields  and  at  people  he  reaped  "  the  harvest 
of  a  quiet  eye."  His  is  pastoral  poetry  before  it 
hardens  into  conventionalism.  His  nymphs  are  still 
real  people,  his  fishes  are  not  yet  finny  tribes,  nor 
his  woods  groves.  When  he  commends  a  maiden 
there  is  a  sufficient  tinge  of  genuineness  in  the  com- 
mendation. And  he  does  it  as  exquisitely  as  it  can 
be  done.  There  is  she  who — 

Counts  her  beauty  to  converse 
In  all  the  languages  as  hers  ; 
Nor  yet  in  those  herself  employs, 
But  for  the  wisdom,  not  the  noise  ; 
Nor  yet  that  wisdom  would  aff'ect. 
But  as  'tis  Heaven's  dialect. 

And  she  of  whom  he  wrote  : 

Her  soul  was  on  Heaven  so  bent. 
No  minute  but  it  came  and  went  ; 
That,  ready  her  last  debt  to  pay. 
She  summed  her  Hfe  up  every  day  ; 
Modest  as  morn,  as  mid-day  bright, 
Gentle  as  evening,  cool  as  night  : 
'Tis  true  ;  but  all  too  weakly  said  ; 
'Twas  more  significant,  she's  dead. 

And  the  sweetest  of  all  is  the  nymph,  not  directly 
described,  who  laments  her  little  pale  fawn  shot  by 
passing  troopers  : 

74 


ANDREW  MARVELL 

Thou  ne'er  didst  alive 
Them  any  harm,  alas  !  nor  could 
Thy  death  yet  do  them  any  good. 
I'm  sure  I  never  wished  them  ill  ; 
Nor  do  I  for  all  this,  nor  will. 

That  is  a  characteristic  passage  from  the  member 
for  Hull.  But  he  had  another  aspect  :  as  a  satirist 
he  vied  with  Oldham,  if  not  with  Dryden. 

If  Marvell,  in  his  serious  poems,  is  a  bridge  be- 
tween the  mid-seventeenth  century  and  the  age  of 
Gay  and  Prior,  his  satirical  poems  are  also  transi- 
tional. They  are  almost  all  in  couplets.  The  earliest, 
choked  and  rambling  and  stumbling,  are  clearly 
under  the  influence  of  Donne  ;  the  latest,  such  as 
"  Nostradamus'  Prophecy,"  anticipate  the  smooth 
closed  epigrammatic  verses  of  the  Augustans.  Some 
interest  in  the  details  of  political  history  is  needed 
for  a  man  to  read  Marvell's  Satires  all  through. 
Most  of  them — privately  circulated  in  MS.  during 
his  lifetime  and  not  "  released  for  publication  " 
until  the  Glorious  Revolution — ^were  satires  upon 
the  corruption  and  debauchery  of  Charles  II,  his 
brother  and  their  satellites  at  Court  and  in  Par- 
liament. The  purity  of  the  writer's  motives  is  never 
in  doubt.  The  reader  never  feels,  as  he  must  when 
perusing  the  works  of  many  such  men,  that  the 
author  would  rather  flagellate  anybody  than  nobody. 
He  was  concerned  for  the  State  and,  as  a  monarchist, 
he  let  the  King  down  as  Hghtly  as  he  could.  He 
seldom  went  farther,  when  in  the  King's  person, 
than  where,  in  the  dialogue  between  Charles  I's 
horse  at  Whitehall  and  Charles  IPs  at  Woolchurch, 
he  makes  the  latter  say  : 

75 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

De  Witt  and  Cromwell  had  each  a  brave  soul  ; 
I  freely  declare  it,  I  am  for  old  Noll  ; 
Though  his  government  did  a  tyrant  resemble, 
He  made  England  great  and  his  enemies  tremble. 

But  the  purity  of  his  motives  and  the  soundness  of 
his  judgment  regarding  individuals  do  not  make  his 
satires  uniformly  readable,  and  it  was  only  inter- 
mittently that  he  achieved  in  them  the  triumphs  of 
art  which  will  keep  even  purely  topical  satire  alive. 
He  who  cares  to  read  them,  however,  will  con- 
tinually be  rewarded  by  sharp  little  witticisms  and 
gleams  of  warm  and  gentle  humour.  In  the  earliest 
of  all  we  find  the  youth  who  is  deserted  by  his  hired 
poet  : 

Who  should  commend  his  mistress  now  ?    Or  who 
Praise  him  ?    Both  difficult  indeed  to  do 
With  truth. 

"  The  Character  of  Holland  "  is  a  beautiful  example 
of  deUberately  farcical  hyperbole.  *'  Holland,  that 
scarce  deserves  the  name  of  land  "  gives  the  key- 
note. It  is  formed  by  the  off-scouring  of  the  coasts 
of  Briton,  which  the  Dutch  have  laboriously  heaped 
together,  "  Building  their  watery  Babel  far  more 
high  To  reach  the  sea,  than  those  to  scale  the  sky !  " 

Glad  then,  as  miners  that  have  found  the  ore, 
They,  with  mad  labour  fished  the  land  to  shore, 
And  dived  as  desperately  for  each  piece 
Of  earth,  as  if  it  had  been  of  ambergris, 

76 


ANDREW  MARVELL 

Collecting  anxiously  small  loads  of  clay, 
Less  than  what  building  swallows  bear  away, 
Or  than  those  pills  which  sordid  beetles  roll. 
Transfusing  into  them  their  dunghill  soul. 

Of  his  later  works,  the  most  considerable  take  the 
then  popular  form  of  "  Instructions  to  a  Painter  "  : 
telling  the  artist  what  to  paint,  the  poet  described 
everything  in  society  and  politics  to  which  he 
objected.  All  of  these  works  were  anonymous  ;  but 
some  of  Mar  veil's  controversial  prose  was  acknow- 
ledged. His  greatest  success  w^as  with  his  "  Re- 
hearsal Transposed,"  in  which  he  attacked  Samuel 
Parker,  who  had  claimed  for  princes  the  powder  to 
determine  their  subjects'  religion.  Marvell's  con- 
troversial wit  W'as  so  good  that  when  Roger  1 'Estrange, 
the  licenser,  wanted  to  suppress  it,  the  King  him- 
self (who  would  forgive  anything  provided  it  were 
wittily  done)  told  1 'Estrange  that  he  must  not  in- 
terfere with  it. 

Marvell,  the  politician,  was  an  incorruptible  man 
in  a  corrupt  age.  He  cared  for  his  country  ;  his 
opinions  were  not  coloured  by  ambition  or  personal 
prejudice.  He  took  his  Parliamentary  duties  so 
seriously  that  he  wrote  to  his  constituents  daily, 
they  recognising  his  solicitude  with  a  regular  salary 
and  frequent  presents  of  barrels  of  beer.  Yet  it  may 
be  doubted  whether  he  had  much  influence  on  the 
course  of  events,  and  I  cannot  think  that  those  who 
have  commended  his  abandonment  of  poetry  for 
the  public  service  have  come  any\vhere  near  proving 
that  he  did  wisely.  They  are  thinking  rather  of  a 
hypothetical  than  of  the  real  case.  Marvell  did  not 

77 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

hold  high  office,  and  he  seldom  spoke  in  the  House  : 
few,  probably,  took  the  slightest  notice  of  his  ad- 
mirable example  of  incompatibility ;  and  if,  through 
his  entrance  into  politics,  we  lost  a  few  lyric  poems 
equal  to  his  best,  we  have,  I  imagine,  lost  more  than 
his  contemporaries  gained. 

Mar  veil  seems  to  have  been,  one  may  conclude 
by  saying,  as  sensible  a  critic  as  he  was  a  politician. 
He  recognised  immediately  the  "  might  "  and 
**  majesty  "  of  "  Paradise  Lost,"  and  the  nature  of 
Butler's  subject  did  not  prevent  him  from  paying 
several  handsome  tributes  to  ''  Hudibras."  In  every 
capacity  Marvell  had  not  merely  the  desire,  but  the 
ability,  to  be  both  honest  and  fair. 


78 


A  DICTIONARY 

LEARNING  and  the  desire  and  capacity  for 
research  do  not  always  go  with  a  zest  for  Ufe. 
Many  of  our  standard  works  are  far  drier  than  they 
have  any  reason  to  be.  Take  Webster's  ''  Diction- 
ary," for  instance.  It  is  beyond  all  doubt  the  best 
dictionary  of  its  size  and  scope  in  existence  ;  if  one 
cannot  have  the  great  Oxford  compilation,  Webster 
is  the  next  best  thing.  But  Noah  Webster  and  his 
successors,  for  all  their  magnificent  devotion  to 
their  task,  have  not  got  much  colour  into  their  work. 
It  was  not  always  so.  Cotgrave's  definitions  were 
full  of  salt,  and  Dr.  Johnson  deUberately  made  his 
work  at  once  as  accurate  and  as  entertaining  as  he 
could.  Modern  lexicographers  have  feared  the  re- 
proach of  superficiality  and  have  excluded  person- 
ality from  their  work.  It  is  a  very  great  pleasure 
therefore  to  get  An  Etymological  Dictionary  of  Modern 
English  from  Mr.  Ernest  Weekley. 

One  knows  from  experience  that  Mr.  Weekley 
would  contrive  to  avoid  unnecessary  dullness  even 
if  he  were  compiling  a  railway  guide  ;  but  that  he 
would  also  get  the  trains  right.  This  dictionary  is 
not  meant  to  be  a  substitute  for  Webster  and  his 
kind,  but  a  complement  to  them.  Mr.  Weekley 's 
aim  is  to  cover  our  "  literary  and  colloquial  vocabu- 
lary, so  far  as  the  former  is  not  purely  archaic  and 
the  latter  not  purely  technical  or  local  "  ;  he  ex- 
cludes most  modern  scientific  terms,  and  endeavours 
to  include  current  slang  words,  many  of  which  have 
been  overlooked  by  his  predecessors,  and  all  foreign 

79 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

words  which  are  hkely  to  occur  in  reading  and 
educated  conversation.  He  has  picked  and  chosen 
his  ground,  and  frankly  admits  it.  But  another  thing 
he  admits  without  shame  is  that  he  has  done  his  best 
to  make  his  learning  palatable. 

Mr.  Weekley,  to  some  extent  in  his  definitions 
and  to  a  large  extent  in  his  illustrations,  has  re- 
turned to  the  Johnson  tradition,  his  affection  for 
which  is  displayed  in  his  reproduction  of  Johnson's 
best  things.  "  It  has  always  seemed  to  the  compiler," 
he  says,  ''  that  a  dictionary  without  quotations  is 
too  unrelieved  in  its  austerity.  Those  included  here 
range  chronologically  from  the  Venerable  Bede  to 
Mr.  Horatio  Bottomley."  The  result  is  something 
which  is  not  merely  a  dictionary,  but  an  anthology  ; 
a  book,  even,  which  one  might  without  brutality 
leave  lying  about  in  one's  visitors'  bedrooms.  He 
does  not,  any  more  than  Johnson  did,  take  pains  to 
secure  the  presence  of  at  least  one  facetious  remark 
on  every  page,  but  when  the  spirit  moves  him  he 
puts  down  a  definition  which  lays  bare  some  small 
portion  of  his  intellectual  history.  This  is  what  he 
says,  for  instance,  about  "  unquestionably  "  : 

In  philology  usu.  in  refer,  to  some  hazy  recol- 
lection of  an  amateur  theory  propounded  in  the 
''  correspondence  column." 

He  supports  this  with  two  quotations  from  news- 
papers. One  goes  :  "  '  Odds  '  is  unquestionably  a 
corruption  of  *  orts,'  "  which  appeared  in  the  Daily 
Chronicle,  and  the  other  is  a  similarly  bold  sentence 
from   the    Observer.    Like   Johnson,   he    does    not 

80 


A  DICTIONARY 

disdain  to  put  in  clear  references  to  his  own  experi- 
ences. One  illustration,  he  feels,  will  do  as  well  as 
another  ;  so  why  not  choose  illustrations  which  will 
give  the  reader  a  little  amusement  when  he  strays 
upon  them  ?  Hence  we  get,  under  "  Nietzscheism/' 
some  extremely  uncomplimentary  remarks  made 
by  a  monthly  paper  on  Professor  Weekley  himself  ; 
and  under  "  monger  "  we  find  : 

Common  since  i6  cent,  in  nonce-formations 
implying  "  one  who  carries  on  a  contemptible 
or  discreditable  '  trade  '  or  *  traffic  '  in  what  is 
denoted  by  the  first  element  of  the  compound." 
(N.E.D.). 

Professor  Weekley  is  well  known  to  our  readers 

as  the  most  entertaining  of  living  word-mongers. 

— {Daily  News,  November  8,  191 6.) 

"  Values  "  is  illustrated  by  only  two  quotations, 
which  together  make  a  poignant  short  story.  These 
are  they  : 

We  apologise  to  Mr.  Wells  for  using  the  word 
"  values  "  since  he  dislikes  it. — {Times  Lit.  Supp., 
June  5,  1919.) 

The  hooligan  sees  none  of  the  values  of  the 
stranger. — (H.  G.  Wells,  Observer,  January  18, 
1920.) 

and  under  "  conscience  "  stands  the  following 
quotation  : 

A  conscientious  objector,  who  gave  an  address 
at  Knutsford,  was  fined  ^4  at  W^arrington  for  de- 
frauding the  railway  company. — {Daily  Chronicle^ 
April  24,  1 91 8.) 

81  G 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Throughout  he  has  studied,  even  when  not  (so 
to  speak)  parading  an  arriere-pensee,  as  he  does  here, 
to  make  his  quotations  Hvely.  He  has  illustrated 
"  verisimilitude  "  with  the  best  of  all  possible 
quotations  :  Pooh-Bah's  *'  Corroborative  detail 
intended  to  give  artistic  verisimilitude  to  a  bald 
and  unconvincing  narrative."  Under  *'  vengeance  " 
we  find  an  extract  from  the  Observer  :  "  A  distin- 
guished neutral  calls  it  peace  with  a  vengeance." 
"  Mixed  metaphor  "  is  exemplified  with  a  remark- 
able quotation  from  the  Fortnightly  for  July,  1919  : 

In  1 914  our  old,  regular  army  crossed  swords 
with  a  great  numerical  superiority  of  the  cream 
of  the  German  host  at  concert  pitch  and  un- 
damaged by  war. 

This  is  much  better  than  resuscitating  once  more 
Sir  Boyle  Roche's  rat,  which  was  floating  in  the  air 
and  should  be  nipped  in  the  bud.  Of  all  these  strik- 
ing illustrations,  one  of  the  most  surprising  comes 
on  the  very  first  page.  It  illustrates  the  colloquial 
use  of  ''  A.I,"  and  runs  : 

A  proper  A.i  copper-bottom  lie. 

Would  you  believe  that  that  comes  out  of  The  Ti7nes 
of  191 7  ?  In  its  solemn  context  it  comes  with  almost 
as  much  unexpectedness  as  the  quotation  which 
stands  alone  in  its  glory  beneath  the  long  disserta- 
tion on  the  word  "  German  "  : 

He  called  me  a  German  and  other  filthy  names. 
(Defendant  in  Middlesex  Police  Court,  191 5.) 

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A  DICTIONARY 

Much  knowledge  may  be  acquired  by  anyone 
who  studies  Professor  Weekley's  less  topical  quota- 
tions. Looking  up  "  Panjandrum,"  I  learn  (I  at 
least  did  not  know  it  before)  that  the  celebrated 
rigmarole  about  '*  What  !  No  Soap  ?  "  was  written 
by  Foote.  Underneath  it  is  Panopticon,  a  word  which 
was  coined  by  Bentham  "  as  name  for  ideal  circular 
prison  in  which  captives  could  be  always  watched." 
Whether  the  great  Utilitarian  thought  that  this  in- 
vention w^ould  promote  the  greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest,  or  any,  number  is  not  recorded  ;  but  Pro- 
fessor Weekley's  phrase  leads  one  to  reflect  on  the 
beautiful  elasticity  of  the  word  "  ideal."  I  strolled 
from  this,  by  a  natural  progress,  to  "  Utilitarian." 
This  word  apparently  has  been  traced  back  not  to 
any  philosophic  work,  but  to  Gait's  *'  Annals  of  the 
Parish."  Under  *'  fountain-pen  "  we  find  surpris- 
ingly early  references,  as  for  instance  one  in  an 
advertisement  printed  in  the  Morning  Chronicle  of 
June  II,  1788  :  "  Portable  fountain  pens  to  carry 
ink  and  write  well,  made  and  sold  by  E.  T.  Williams, 
No.  13,  Strand."  *'  Portmanteau  word  "  was  in- 
vented by  Lewis  Carroll  :  examples  given  include 
*'  Eurasian,"  "  Bakerloo,"  '*  electrocute,"  "  squar- 
son," and  "  gerrymander  "  :  the  thing  was  older 
than  the  name  for  it.  Tw^o  other  oddities  I  must 
quote.  Professor  Weekley  has  been  so  lucky  as  to 
find  in  a  work  of  Queen  Anne's  own  time  a  passage 
which  shows  that  the  sentence  by  which  Queen 
Anne  chiefly  lives  was  older  than  she.  Swift,  in  his 
*'  Polite  Conversation,"  has  this  dialogue  : 

*'  What  news,  Mr.  Neverout  ?  Why,  Madam, 
Queen  Ehzabeth's  dead." 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

And  under  the  word,  new  to  myself,  '*  mugger  "  I 
find  this  chaste  entry  : 

Mugger.  Broad-nosed  Indian  crocodile.  Hind. 

"  magar."   Curiously  confused  in  quotation  below 

with  "  nuzzer,"  ceremonial  present. 

Sir  Salar  Jung  was  presented  to  the  Queen 
and  offered  his  mugger  as  a  token  of  allegiance, 
which  her  Majesty  touched  and  restored. 

Even  Queen  Victoria  might  have  been  for  a  moment 
at  a  loss  if  it  really  had  been  a  broad-nosed  crocodile. 
Most  of  the  latest  slang  is  to  be  found  in  Pro- 
fessor Weekley's  book.  Many  words  which  became 
popular  during  the  war  were  older  than  the  war. 
*'  Cushy  "  probably  came  from  the  East,  and  **  is 
said  to  be  Hind,  from  Pers.  khush,  pleasure." 
''  Wangle,"  one  of  the  words  for  the  use  of  which 
occasion  is  most  frequently  found  nowadays,  is 
stated  to  have  been  recorded  as  printers'  slang  in 
1888  ;  and  it  has  been  found  in  a  book  by  Mr.  Edgar 
Wallace,  published  two  years  before  the  war.  "  Fed 
up,"  as  most  people  will  remember,  first  became 
popular  at  the  time  of  the  South  African  War,  but 
Mr.  Weekley  produces  an  example  older  than  that 
from  G.  W.  Steevens's  book,  ''  With  Kitchener  to 
Khartoum."  Of  another  interesting  and  popular 
phrase  he  observes  :  "  Mod.  '  to  get  it  in  the  neck  ' 
appears  to  allude  to  '  where  the  chicken  got  the  axe.' 
A  further  playful  variation  is  '  where  Maggie  wore 
the  beads.'  "  '*  Scrap  "  is  far  older  than  most  people 
would  think.  A  sentence  of  1679-80  runs  :  *'  They 
are  in  great  fear  Sir  Robt.  Payton  should  bring  them 

84 


A  DICTIONARY 

into  y®  scrappe."  On  many  other  colloquial  terms 
light  is  shed.  *'  Thorough-paced,"  which  is  now 
never  used  save  in  a  derogatory  connection,  was 
once  a  quite  straightforward  word,  and  men  spoke 
of  "  a  thorough-paced  Christian."  "  Rhino,"  as 
one  of  the  hundred  synonyms  for  money,  is  traced 
to  the  seventeenth  century,  and  is  "  apparently  con- 
nected by  some  obscure  joke  with  '  rhinoceros,'  as 
'  rhinocerical,'  wealthy,  also  occurs."  "Loafer  "is 
referred  to  as  a  newly-invented  Yankee  word  in 
Dana's  ''Two  Years  Before  the  Mast"  (1840),  and 
"  bally  "  is  traced  back  to  1885,  where  its  origins 
are  matter  of  speculation.  The  verb  "  to  bitch," 
used  as  an  equivalent  of  to  bungle  or  make  a  mess 
of  it,  is  described  as  "thinned  form  of  'botch.'" 
Under  "  blimy  "  one  searches  in  vain  for  the  re- 
sults of  research,  the  Professor  being  content  with  : 
"  For  Gawblimy,  God  blind  me  ;  cf.  swop  me 
bob."  Of  modern  terms  of  derision,  "  cad  "  is  said 
to  have  an  Oxford  origin,  and  "  bounder  "  and 
"  rotter  "  to  have  started  on  their  careers  from 
Cambridge.  In  my  time  their  equivalent  at  the  latter 
University  was  usually  "  tout,"  now  perhaps  fallen 
into  disuse,  and  absent  (in  this  sense)  from  Pro- 
fessor Weekley's  Dictionary. 

I  do  not  affect  to  have  read  this  book  right 
through,  though  its  charms  have  beguiled  me  into 
reading  twenty  times  more  of  it  than  the  minimum 
amount  which  would  have  made  me  capable  of 
writing  a  thoroughly  deceptive  review.  But  I  have 
noticed  several  omissions  which  can  scarcely  have 
been  deliberate.  No  man  making  a  particular  effort 
to  embody  the  whole  of  contemporary  slang  should 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

have  overlooked  the  verb  "  to  jaw  "  with  its  school- 
boy derivative,  now  respectably  estabHshed,  ''  pi- 
jaw."  Professor  Weekley  gives  "  wind  up,"  but 
misses  "  cold  feet,"  and  his  sporting  vocabulary 
does  not  include  the  common  cricketing  term 
"  rabbit."  Had  he  carried  his  researches  into  the 
more  adventurous  spheres  of  finance  he  might  have 
heard  the  term  ''  put  the  hooks  into,"  and  also 
*'  cough  up,"  neither  of  which  he  records.  How- 
ever, most  of  the  terms  by  which  I  have  tested  him 
are  here,  and  he  seems  to  have  made  very  few  errors 
which  can  be  detected  by  a  non-philologist.  But  he 
has,  I  think,  gone  badly  off  the  rails  (there  is  another 
metaphorical  usage  which  he  has  missed)  in  deaHng 
with  the  word  *'  profiteer."  He  thinks  it  a  war- word 
and  ascribes  to  it  the  definite  date  191 5.  But  it  was 
current  in  the  Labour  movement  for  years  before 
the  war,  and  I  fancy  that  a  search  of  the  files  of  the 
New  Age  might  lead  him  to  its  origin. 


86 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 

WHAT,  could  she  read  his  book,  would 
Queen  Victoria  say  of  Mr.  Lytton  Strachey? 
She  would  certainly  think  him  a  monster.  She  might 
say  that,  Uke  the  pioneers  of  "  Women's  Rights," 
he  deserved  "  a  whipping  "  ;  she  might  be  tempted 
to  use  phrases  such  as  she  used  about  the  Russians : 
"  It  makes  the  Queen's  blood  boil !  Oh,  if  the  Queen 
were  a  man,  she  would  like  to  go  and  give  those 
Russians,  whose  word  one  cannot  believe,  a  beat- 
ing." But  her  judgments  of  strangers  were  frequently 
hasty  ;  she  was  tempted  to  be  deceived  by  surface 
appearances  :  the  slightest  sign  of  a  divagation  from 
her  own  opinion  was  liable  to  draw  from  her  a 
passionate  demand  for  hostihties.  And  if  she,  or 
anyone  else,  were  deceived  by  appearances  into 
thinking  Mr.  Strachey 's  book  anything  but  a  tribute, 
a  great  mistake  would  be  made. 

It  was  observed  when  Mr.  Strachey  wrote  his 
last  book  that  he  was,  although  a  rather  sceptical 
and  studiously  ironical  writer,  a  man  anxious  to  be 
just  and  capable  of  warm  sympathy  with  certain 
kinds  of  character.  He  has  little  use  for  the  ordi- 
nary humdrum  man.  He  regards  the  appellation 
"  Christian  gentleman  "  as  almost  equivalent  to  a 
term  of  reproach  ;  when  he  encounters  the  com- 
mon, cautious,  dutiful  person  he  shoots  one  con- 
temptuous bullet  at  him  and  leaves  him  for  dead. 
But  he  can  admire  :  he  admired,  within  limits, 
General  Gordon,  Cardinal  Newman,  and  Florence 
Nightingale.   He   Ukes,   understands,   and   respects 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

adventurousness,  recklessness,  passionate  sincerity 
in  any  form,  even  discontent,  because  it  does  not 
go  with  smugness  ;  and  by  the  same  token  he  is 
attracted  by,  and  in  effect  extols.  Queen  Victoria. 
**  It  was,"  he  says,  "  her  sincerity  which  gave  her 
at  once  her  impressiveness,  her  charm,  and  her 
absurdity." 

In  300  pages  he  gives  a  picture  of  her  whole  life  ; 
as  girl  (so  guarded  that  she  was  never  left  alone  in  a 
room  with  a  single  person),  as  young  monarch 
(coming  like  "  the  spring  "  after  her  debauched 
uncles),  as  happily  married  woman,  as  cloistered 
and  laborious  widow,  and  as  the  aged  Empress  who 
was  almost  a  legendary  figure  whilst  she  was  still 
alive,  and  enjoyed  an  Indian  summer  of  mellow 
glory.  Throughout  he  is  never — he  never  would  be 
— tempted  to  sentimentalise.  He  attributes  to  her 
nothing  that  she  does  not  possess.  He  never  dis- 
guises the  fact  that  her  speech  was  usually  emotional 
gush,  that  she  had  little  intellect,  that  her  inter- 
ferences in  public  affairs  were  uninformed,  and  might 
have  been  disastrous.  He  is,  in  opinion,  as  opposed 
to  Queen  Victoria  as  he  could  be  ;  she  had  probably 
not  a  notion  about  this  world  or  the  next,  the  throne, 
the  hearth,  or  the  altar,  which  he  shares.  But  she 
was  honest  and  she  was  fiery  ;  she  knew  what  she 
wanted  and  fought  for  what  she  wanted  ;  she  slaved 
at  what  she  conceived  to  be  her  duty,  and  she  had 
a  great  capacity  for  suffering  ;  she  loved  Hfe  and 
hated  dying  ;  and  her  biographer  cannot  but  be 
drawn  to  her.  She  was  a  powerful,  a  puzzHng,  and 
(whatever  her  pride  and  egoism)  an  attractive  and 
affectionate  woman.  She  is  displayed  as  such  here, 

88 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 

but  she  would  probably  fly  ofl^  at  a  tangent  before 
discovering  it.  She  had  an  acute  nostril  for  Use- 
majesU. 

But  here  she  is.  Most  of  the  materials  are  the  old 
ones.  Mr.  Strachey  has  availed  himself  of  a  certain 
amount  of  private  information,  and  he  has  seen  the 
unpublished  parts  of  Greville — which,  by  the  way, 
might  just  as  well  be  pubHshed  at  this  date.  But 
these  new  sources  are  comparatively  unimportant. 
Everything  depends  on  the  perceptions  and  the  art 
of  the  biographer.  With  all  the  old  materials  Mr. 
Strachey  has  given  us  a  new  picture  of  the  Queen, 
and  a  new  and  (since  he  discovered  a  strain  of  dis- 
satisfaction and  melancholy  in  him)  sympathetic 
portrait  of  Prince  Albert. 

The  volume  is  an  important  addition  to  historical 
literature.  The  age  appears  as  a  background  to  the 
two  central  figures  ;  it  is  a  century  seen  through  a 
diminishing  glass.  And  how  clearly  and  amusingly 
seen  !  Nobody  w^ho  read  ''  Eminent  Victorians  " 
will  need  to  be  told  that  Mr.  Strachey's  book  is 
delightful  reading.  He  has  learnt  his  art,  not  from 
the  historians  and  biographers,  but  from  the  artists. 
We  are  conscious,  though  not  disagreeably  con- 
scious, throughout  that  he  is  taking  his  job  seriously 
from  an  aesthetic,  as  well  as  from  a  historical,  point 
of  view  ;  that  he  is,  in  a  general  way,  soHcitous 
about  proportion  and  in  detail  careful  to  select  the 
significant  episode  and  the  significant  characteristic 
and  to  order  his  words  in  the  most  telling  way.  There 
is  no  such  short  biography  in  English  ;  thinking  of 
its  analogues,  one  finds  oneself  inevitably  comparing 
it  not  with  records  of  fact,  but  with  fictions.  He  is 

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really  one  of  the  post- Flaubert  novelists.  His  work 
is  as  uniform,  as  coherent,  as  economical  as  the  best 
short  stories  of  Maupassant  and  Tchekov.  Such 
closeness  and  evenness  of  texture,  such  clarity  and 
terseness  of  phrase,  can  be  found  nowhere  in  bio- 
graphy. The  book  recalls  rather  such  novels  as 
Couperus's  "Old  People  and  Things  that  Pass" — 
though  I  am  far  from  suggesting  that  Queen  Victoria 
and  her  Consort  bore  any  resemblance  to  the  central 
characters  of  that  very  alarming  study.  And  Mr. 
Strachey,  writing  a  short  and  sparsely-documented 
book,  in  which  years  are  often  skimmed  in  a  sen- 
tence, produces  an  effect  of  completeness  which  is 
seldom  produced  by  the  two-volume  monuments 
of  the  last  generation.  Reflecting  on  the  old  Queen's 
death  at  Osborne  he  says  : 

Perhaps  her  fading  mind  called  up  once  more 
the  shadows  of  the  past  to  float  before  it,  and  re- 
traced, for  the  last  time,  the  vanished  visions  of 
that  long  history — passing  back  and  back,  through 
the  cloud  of  years,  to  older  and  ever  older  memo- 
ries— to  the  spring  woods  at  Osborne,  so  full 
of  primroses  for  Lord  Beaconsfield — to  Lord 
Palmerston's  queer  clothes  and  high  demeanour, 
and  Albert's  face  under  the  green  lamp,  and 
Albert's  first  stag  at  Balmoral,  and  Albert  in  his 
blue  and  silver  uniform,  and  the  Baron  coming 
in  through  a  doorway,  and  Lord  M.  dreaming  at 
Windsor  with  the  rooks  cawing  in  the  elm-trees, 
and  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  on  his  knees 
in  the  dawn,  and  the  old  King's  turkey-cock 
ejaculations,  and  Uncle  Leopold's  soft  voice  at 

90 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 

Claremont,  and  Lehzen  with  the  globes,  and  her 
mother's  feathers  sweeping  down  towards  her, 
and  a  great  old  repeater-watch  of  her  father's  in 
its  tortoiseshell  case,  and  a  yellow  rug,  and  some 
friendly  flounces  of  sprigged  musHn,  and  the 
trees  and  the  grass  at  Kensington. 

It  is  a  long  catalogue  of  the  typical  incidents  of  a 
long  Hfe.  The  point  is  that  when  they  are  thus  drifted 
in  series  before  us,  we  are  already  familiar  with 
them  all.  In  three  hundred  pages  a  whole  century 
has  been  indicated  ;  and,  turning  back  to  a  scene 
which  one  assumes  must  have  occupied  a  chapter, 
one  finds  it  suggested  in  a  brief  parenthesis. 

Mr.  Strachey's  craft  and  assiduity  have  displayed 
before  us  the  long  and  crowded  life  of  his  heroine, 
a  succession  of  social  changes,  the  crumbling  of  one 
era  after  another,  and  a  swarm  of  minor  characters. 
In  retrospect  one  finds  that  his  gift  of  selection  has 
imprinted  very  many  minor  portraits  on  the  memory. 
There  are  the  seven  sons  of  George  III  :  the  Regent 
with  his  stomach  released  from  his  stays,  and  the 
Duke  of  Kent  with  his  precision  and  his  debts,  and 
King  WilHam,  *'  A  bursting,  bubbhng  old  gentle- 
man, with  quarter-deck  gestures,  round  rolling  eyes, 
and  a  head  like  a  pineapple,"  who  went  redder  than 
usual  when  the  King  of  the  Belgians  insisted  on 
drinking  water  at  his  table.  There  is  dear,  absent- 
minded,  wise,  flippant  old  Lord  Melbourne,  "  the 
autumn  rose  "  of  the  eighteenth  century,  of  whom 
Greville  said  that  he  was  '*  a  man  with  a  capacity  for 
loving  without  having  anything  in  the  world  to 
love."  There  is  the  old  Duke,  with  his  shrewd  eyes, 

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his  nose,  and  his  wry  smile,  always  called  in  at  an 
emergency  and  summing  up  any  position  in  a  laconic 
sentence.  There  is  Lord  Palmerston,  without  prin- 
ciple, but  holding  that  one  really  couldn't  think  of 
the  Neapolitan  prisons  without  getting  angry ; 
volatile  and  wilful  :  turning  up  at  Osborne  just  after 
the  Consort's  death  "  in  the  pink  of  health,  brisk, 
with  his  whiskers  freshly  dyed,  and  dressed  in  a 
brown  overcoat,  light  grey  trousers,  green  gloves, 
and  blue  studs."  There  is  Gladstone,  just  glimpsed 
but  truly  seen  ;  and  Napoleon  III,  whose  gipsyish- 
ness  fascinated  the  Queen  ;  and  Disraeli,  actor  in 
his  own  play,  who  laid  the  flattery  on  with  a  trowel, 
and  received  favours  never  bestowed  on  another 
subject.  A  few  of  these  minor  characters  are  less 
clear  than  others  :  the  Duchess  of  Kent,  Lehzen, 
and  the  conscientious  Stockmar,  who  advised  that 
the  Prince  of  Wales  should  be  '*  brought  up  in  the 
creed  of  the  Church  of  England  "  without  being 
led  to  believe  in  '*  the  supernatural  doctrines  of 
Christianity."  But  these  are  figures  which  should 
properly  be  less  dim  than  those  others  :  they  are  the 
mysterious  outskirts.  Generally  speaking,  the  im- 
pression made  is  the  impression  of  a  consummately 
written  short  novel  :  each  figure  displayed  in  pro- 
portion to  its  importance  in  the  story,  each  incident 
elaborated  according  to  the  degree  and  weight  of 
its  relevance  to  the  main  theme. 

And  Mr.  Strachey's  writing  is  almost  consistently 
excellent.  He  wastes  no  words.  He  has,  as  has  been 
remarked,  his  outlook  ;  and  his  irony  is  often  crystal- 
Hsed  in  a  sentence,  even  in  a  sentence  unspoken. 
'*  And  fortunately,  if  the  world  would  not  understand, 

92 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 

there  were  faithful  friends  who  did.  There 
was  Lord  Granville,  and  there  was  '  kind  Mr. 
Theodore  Martin'";  a  chapter  of  criticism  is  im- 
plicit in  the  phrase.  Describing  the  aptness  of  the 
design  of  the  Albert  Memorial,  which  was  modelled 
on  a  form  of  shrine,  he  says,  with  brutal  reticence, 
that  the  architect's  "  idea  was  particularly  appro- 
priate, since  it  chanced  that  a  similar  conception, 
though  in  the  reverse  order  of  magnitude,  had 
occurred  to  the  Prince  himself,  who  had  designed 
and  executed  several  silver  cruet-stands  upon  the 
same  model."  The  section  on  the  Crimean  War 
begins  with  the  uncannily  adequate  statement :  "  The 
Crimean  War  brought  new  experiences,  and  most 
of  them  were  pleasant  ones."  Mr.  Strachey  never 
sets  up  pointers  to  his  jokes  :  he  merely  describes 
a  thing  in  very  simple,  but  the  right,  words  to  get 
his  effects.  We  flow  smoothly  on  from  some  merely 
explanatory  passage  into  sentences,  equally  matter- 
of-fact  on  the  surface,  like  these  : 

Upon  the  interior  decorations  Albert  and 
Victoria  lavished  all  their  care.  The  walls  and  the 
floors  were  of  pitch-pine,  and  covered  with 
specially  manufactured  tartans.  The  Balmoral 
tartan,  in  red  and  grey,  designed  by  the  Prince, 
and  the  Victorian  tartan,  with  a  white  stripe, 
designed  by  the  Queen,  were  to  be  seen  in  every 
room  :  there  were  tartan  curtains,  and  tartan 
chair-covers,  and  even  tartan  linoleums.  Occasion- 
ally the  Royal  Stuart  tartan  appeared,  for  Her 
Majesty  always  maintained  that  she  was  an  ardent 
Jacobite.  Water-colour  sketches  by  Victoria  hung 

93 


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upon  the  walls,  together  with  innumerable  stags' 
antlers,  and  the  head  of  a  boar  which  had  been 
shot  by  Albert  in  Germany.  In  an  alcove  in  the 
hall  stood  a  life-sized  statue  of  Albert  in  High- 
land dress. 

The  quotations  are  as  economically,  as  aptly,  and 
as  gravely  introduced  ;  for  instance,  this,  which 
stands  without  comment :  '*  We  were  always  in  the 
habit  of  conversing  with  the  Highlanders — with 
whom  one  comes  so  much  in  contact  in  the  High- 
lands." Similarly,  what  it  is  misleading  to  call  the 
purple  passages  grow  out  of  the  context  :  they  are 
adequate,  sometimes  noble,  but  never  obtruded. 
Everything  is  interwoven,  and  in  tone  nothing  stands 
out.  Mr.  Strachey  has  really  digested  everything 
he  has  taken  in. 

Victoria  and  Albert  and  their  age  are  here  recorded 
as  one  man  sees  them.  The  picture  cannot  be  final 
or  complete  ;  but  it  does  present,  and  very  clearly, 
one  aspect  of  the  truth.  Mr.  Strachey  has  naturally 
selected  his  facts  in  accordance  with  his  tempera- 
ment ;  but  he  has  not  cheated,  as  a  man  making  a 
comic  picture  must  be  strongly  tempted  to  do.  And 
whatever  reservations  and  qualifications  he  may 
have  omitted,  however  others  may  differ  from  him 
in  the  assessment  of  what  people  now  call  *'  relative 
values,"  it  is  indisputable  that  so  far  as  he  goes  he 
is  accurate,  and  that  his  portrait  of  his  central  figure 
must,  in  its  essentials,  stand. 


94 


HENLEY 

WILLIAM  ERNEST  HENLEY,  whose  col- 
lected works  now  appear,  was  born  at 
Gloucester  in  1849,  and  educated  there.  He  was  a 
man  of  large  frame,  but  illness  attacked  him,  and  in 
1873  he  went  to  Edinburgh  to  seek  the  aid  of  Lister. 
For  two  years  he  was  in  hospital  there,  during  which 
period  he  first  met  Stevenson,  and  conceived  his 
"  In  Hospital  "  poems.  Discharged  as  a  permanent 
cripple  and  invaUd,  he  edited  London  (1877-8), 
The  Magazine  of  Art  (1882-6),  the  Scots  {National) 
Observer  (1883-93),  ^^^  the  New  Review  (1893-8). 
He  published  many  volumes  of  verse  and  criticism, 
and  died  in  1903  after  celebrating  the  South  African 
War,  and  causing  considerable  disturbance  by  a  too 
drastic  criticism  of  his  dead  friend  Stevenson. 

Henley,  were  he  aUve  to-day,  would  be  only 
seventy-two,  but  his  reputation  has  already  sustained 
strange  vicissitudes.  During  his  life-time  he  was 
known  chiefly  as  a  brilliant  editor  who  had  also  the 
gift  of  forcible  polemic  writing  and  a  peculiar  power 
of  attracting  the  afi^ection  and  service  of  talented 
men.  He  certainly  was  a  great  editor.  He  thought, 
perhaps,  too  exclusively  of  what  he  was  publishing 
and  too  little  of  the  steps  which  might  be  taken  to 
induce  people  to  read  it  ;  the  consequence  being 
that  his  contributors  were  the  kernel  of  his  public 
and  all  his  papers  were  short-lived.  But  he  knew  a 
man  of  force  when  he  met  him,  and  most  of  the 
writers  of  his  time,  from  Stevenson  to  KipUng,  and 
from  Kipling  to  Yeats,  either  established  or  enhanced 

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their  reputations  in  the  pages  which  he  edited. 
But  an  editor's  reputation  is  a  brief  one.  He  may 
perform  great  services  to  literature  in  general  and 
to  particular  authors,  but  no  sooner  has  his  last 
number  appeared  than  his  authors  sail  off  on  their 
own  adventures,  and  his  enterprise  becomes  a 
memory  fading  daily.  No  sooner  had  Henley  died 
than  the  National  Observer  became  a  legend,  to 
which  ageing  journalists  referred  with  sentimental 
regret.  The  young  noted  the  regret  and  were  prepared 
to  take  the  merit  of  the  performance  for  granted  ; 
they  did  not  propose  to  go  to  the  British  Museum 
files  in  order  to  discover  whether  or  not  Henley 
was  a  great  editor.  That  fame  dwindled  ;  Henley 
became  a  "  poet  of  the  'nineties,"  represented 
chiefly  in  anthologies  by  an  apostrophe  to  England 
and  ''  Out  of  the  Night  that  covers  me."  Middle- 
aged  gentlemen  might  still  be  met  who  were  young 
men  with  Henley  and  talked  of  him  as  one  who 
fascinated  and  permanently  influenced  them.  But 
what  had  he  left  ?  Certain  verses.  He  was  one  of  the 
lesser  poets  of  the  later  Victorian  age  ;  an  energetic 
writer  of  verse  who  very  occasionally  rose  to  an 
almost  accidental  perfection.  Yet  it  now  seems 
probable  that  the  poet  in  Henley  will  ultimately 
seem  not  the  most  important  thing  about  him.  If 
his  name  lives  it  will  probably  live  as  a  critic  ;  and 
it  may  be  that  even  yet  some  biographer  may  be 
tempted  to  investigate  and  immortalise  him  as  a  man. 
A  powerful  and  passionate  personality,  an  en- 
thusiasm for  life  and  for  literature,  honesty,  industry 
and  faith  are  not  in  themselves  sufficient  to  con- 
stitute a  great,  or  even  a  good,  poet.  Henley  had  all 

96 


HENLEY 

those  attributes.  We  do  not  need  the  assertions  of 
his  friends  to  convince  us  that  he  cared  about  letters, 
took  a  devouring  interest  in  men,  individual  and  in 
the  mass,  bore  pain  with  gay  courage,  loved,  hated, 
and  jested  with  vigour  and  gusto.  All  that  can  be 
seen  in  his  writings  ;  as  also  that  tendency  to  shout 
and  to  bully  which  so  impressed  his  disciples,  and 
disseminated  so  widely  the  impression  of  his  per- 
sonality. All  these  things  may  be  seen  in  his  works, 
but  they  are  seen  less  purely  in  his  poetry  than  else- 
where, and  he  lacked  certain  qualities  which  are 
essential  in  verse  if  it  is  to  make  a  deep  or  a  lasting 
appeal.  Let  it  be  admitted  that  now  and  then  he 
"  pulled  it  off."  But,  generally  speaking,  he  was, 
when  writing  poetry,  neither  natural  enough  nor 
careful  enough.  The  horse-sense  that  marked  much 
of  his  criticism  deserted  him.  He  dispelled  all  un- 
certainties in  himself  by  loud  vociferation.  He  lacked 
the  confidence  to  employ  simple  language  ;  he 
attempted  to  carry  the  fort  by  storm  and  a  plenitude 
of  great  bombastic  adjectives  ;  he  could  not  state 
precisely  what  he  felt  in  language  just  adequate.  It 
was  all  very  well,  when  he  was  sitting  on  his  sofa, 
beard  bristHng,  hands  swinging,  eyes  flashing,  to 
hammer  away  at  his  audience  with  his  dogmas  and 
his  denunciations.  But  a  worked-up  excitement  is 
no  good  in  poetry;  nor  is  the  thin  and  padded 
language  of  rapid  dictation.  Much  of  Henley's  poetry 
is  precisely  like  dictated  poetry.  In  a  manner  he 
meant  what  he  said.  But  he  could  not  reflect  and 
labour  until  he  had  got  accuracy.  He  must  cover 
the  ground  quickly.  He  must  bang  his  notions  into 
the  listener's  head. 

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The  result  often  was  great  expanses  of  cacophonous 
magniloquence  that  tire  the  ear  and  dazzle  the  eye. 
Is  he  describing  ?  We  get  : 

Out  of  the  poisonous  East, 

Over  a  continent  of  blight, 

Like  a  maleficent  Influence  released 

From  the  most  squalid  cellarage  of  hell, 

The  Wind-Fiend,  the  abominable — 

The  Hangman  Wind  that  tortures  temper  and 

light- 
Comes  slouching,  sullen  and  obscure. 
Hard  on  the  skirts  of  the  embittered  night  ; 
And  in  a  cloud  unclean 
Of  excremental  humours,  roused  to  strife  | 

By  the  operation  of  some  ruinous  change, 
Wherever  his  evil  mandate  rear  and  range,  i 

Into  a  dire  intensity  of  life,  j 

A  craftsman  at  his  bench,  he  settles  down 
To  the  grim  job  of  throttling  London  town.  ; 


Or  is  he  exhorting,  preaching  his  gospel  of  action  ? 
Then  we  get  (the  starting-point  being  Lord  North- 
cliffe's,  then  Mr.  Alfred  Harmsworth's,  motor-car) : 

Thus  the  Mercedes 
Comes,  O  she  comes. 
This  astonishing  device, 
This  amazing  Mercedes, 
With  Speed- 
Speed  in  the  Fear  of  the  Lord. 
So  in  the  eye  of  the  Lord, 
Under  the  Feet  of  the  Lord, 

98 


HENLEY 

Out  of  the  measureless 

Goodness  and  grace 

In  the  Hand  of  the  Lord. 

Speed  ! 

Speed  on  the  Knees. 

Speed  in  the  Laugh, 

Speed  by  the  Gift, 

Speed  in  the  Trust  of  the  Lord — 

Speed. 

It  was  meant.  He  believed.  But  not  all  the  recapitu- 
lations carry  it  home,  nor  all  the  copious  capital 
letters.  His  instrument  was  a  coarse  one,  and  his 
hands,  though  strong,  not  deHcate.  He  had  too  little 
care  about  exactitude,  either  of  meaning  or  of  ex- 
pression ;  and  too  little  ear.  If  his  more  ambitious 
and  robustious  experiments  in  unrhymed  verse 
show  this,  so  also  do  most  of  his  attempts  at  quieter 
song.  The  rhetorician  becomes  the  jingler.  The 
excited  apostle  of  vague  but  tremendous  forces,  the 
booming  chanter  of  "  solemn  ancientries  "  and 
''  plangent  comforters  "  and  a  thousand  other  rather 
too  cumbersome  things  becomes  a  thin  Heine,  sing- 
ing of  dreams  and  roses  with  just  too  little  com- 
pression and  just  too  little  music.  We  may  explain 
away  much  in  him  and  his  verse  on  the  ground  of 
his  lifelong  pain.  He,  by  temperament  and  physique 
a  man  of  action,  compelled  to  inaction  by  his  mala- 
dies, naturally  tended  to  glorify  the  Paradise  from 
which  he  had  been  shut  out,  to  celebrate  the  grim 
glories  of  war  and  adventure,  speed  and  the  sword, 
to  express  himself  through  batterings  and  swirlings 
of  speech  since  his  limbs  would  not  do  their  work. 

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But  he  was  not  an  artist  in  verse  even  when  these 
tendencies  were  not  operating.  Except  in  a  few 
places,  merit  is  to  be  found  in  his  poetry  only  when 
he  is  describing,  with  the  vividness  of  good  journal- 
ism, something  he  has  seen,  and,  above  all,  when 
he  is  painting  a  portrait.  The  nurses,  the  doctors, 
the  patients,  in  his  Edinburgh  hospital  and  the 
strange  gallery  of  his  London  types  :  these  remain 
in  one's  memory  when  the  rest  of  his  metrical  writ- 
ing has  faded  away.  He  had  the  eye  of  a  Daumier 
or  of  a  Phil  May  for  the  character  in  a  face  or  a  gar- 
ment ;  and  he  need  not  mention  Rembrandt  to 
assure  us  that  the  lighting  of  his  hospital  scenes  was 
done  by  one  who  appreciated  painting.  His  des- 
criptions, moreover,  are  not  merely  external  ;  his 
characters  are  grasped  inwardly,  and  his  celebrated 
sonnet  summary  of  Stevenson  is  only  one  out  of 
several  as  good. 

Yet  most  of  these  things  are  little  more  than 
rhymed — or,  indeed,  unrhymed  ! — prose.  Little 
sensuous  appeal  is  made  to  the  ear  ;  the  best  word 
is  not  usually  hunted  for  if  the  second  best  will 
roughly  convey  the  idea  ;  that  "  spherical  "  form 
which  is  a  quality  of  good  poems  is  usually  missing  ; 
what  we  get  is  a  series  of  energetic,  interesting,  and 
frequently  picturesque  statements.  Henley's  verse 
is  commonly  no  more  than  the  journaUsm  of  an 
unusual  man  ;  he  is  at  his  best  when  he  knows  he 
is  writing  journalism.  Some  of  the  critical  work 
now  reprinted  is  careful  and  exhaustive  ;  the  essay 
on  Burns  is  deservedly  famous.  But  much  of  it  was 
casual,  brief,  hurried  work  ;  and  it  is  surprisingly 
good.    Henley's    prose   was   not   always   devoid    of 

100 


HENLEY 

affectations.  He  still  would  sometimes  throw  in  an 
unnecessarily  resounding  or  archaic  word  ;  he  liked 
parading  his  carefully-acquired  knowledge  of  thieves' 
slang  ;  he  favoured  unnecessary  archaisms,  such  as 
the  use  of  "  'tis  "  for  ''it  is."  And  the  things  he 
says  are  still  sometimes  coloured  too  much  by  his 
propagandist  zeal  :  he  bellows  his  revivalist  doctrine 
and  looks  menacingly  round,  prepared  to  thump 
you  on  the  head  if  you  do  not  agree.  But  in  a  general 
way  he  is  far  more  natural  in  prose,  and  far  more 
subtle.  His  taste  was  good,  his  outlook  was  sane, 
his  intellect  (when  he  would  allow  it)  operated  subtly, 
he  could  discriminate  even  with  his  heroes,  and  his 
heroes  were  invariably  men.  His  reading  was  very 
wide  ;  and  his  power,  here,  of  compression  was  so 
great  that  he  could  say  many  valuable  and  pene- 
trating things,  even  in  an  article  of  a  thousand  words, 
on  one  of  the  w^orld's  great  masters.  In  the  more 
miscellaneous  of  these  volumes  there  are  very  short 
papers  on  Dickens  and  Rabelais,  Gay,  Congreve, 
Fielding  and  Tolstoi,  Richardson,  Hood,  Herrick 
and  Hugo  ;  and  every  one  of  them,  though  a  mere 
note,  adds  to  one's  information  and  assists  one's 
insight.  And  there  is  a  beauty  on  Dumas.  For  there 
Henley  found  an  author  who  dreamed  such  men  as 
he  would  like  to  have  been.  His  challenge  to  '*  what- 
ever gods  there  be  "  may  have  been  a  little  bom- 
bastic, not  to  say  tautologous  ;  it  may  have  savoured 
a  Httle  of  the  whistle  on  a  dark  night  to  keep  one's 
spirits  up  and  one's  eyes  from  wandering  into  the 
shadows.  But  he  was  a  joyful  and  a  gallant  man.  In 
a  generation  which  toyed  with  despair  and  disease 
he  would  have  none  of  either  ;   and  his  instinct  for 

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character  and  for  art  was  such  that  he  made  very 
few  mistakes  in  judgment.  The  second  and  the  fourth 
volumes  of  this  edition  are  a  most  vahiable  contri- 
bution to  literary  history  ;  and  they  are  amongst 
the  most  readable  '*  books  about  books  "  that  our 
age  has  produced. 

The  new  edition  is  agreeable  in  appearance.  The 
first  volume  includes  several  poems  not  previously 
reprinted  from  the  papers  in  which  they  originally 
appeared.  The  plays  which  Henley  wrote  in  collabo- 
ration with  Stevenson  are  here;  they  are  vigorous, 
brisk,  and  vivid  :  the  sort  of  plays  that  Mr.  John 
Buchan  might,  but  unfortunately  does  not,  write. 
And  it  was  a  good  idea  to  include  with  Henley's 
w^orks  the  anthology  he  made,  *'  Lyra  Heroica."  He 
is  expressing  himself  here  in  the  selection  of  poems 
by  other  men,  and  his  spirit  is  better  manifested  in 
their  poems  than  in  his  own.  There  is  scarcely  a 
thing  in  the  book  which  is  not  at  once  gallant, 
chivalrous,  and  humane.  There  are  aspects  of  life 
not  represented  in  it  and  human  needs  which  it 
does  not  satisfy.  But  so  far  as  it  goes  it  reflects  as 
much  credit  on  his  character  as  it  does  on  his  taste 
and  as  much  credit  on  his  taste  as  it  does  on  his 
scholarship.  Every  boy  ought  to  be  given  it,  and  no 
man  would  be  the  worse  for  having  it ;  especially  in 
a  period  like  this,  when  the  need  for  preserving  one's 
ideals,  one's  cheerfulness,  and  one's  determination 
to  make  the  most  of  life  under  the  shadow  of  death 
is  more  imperative  than  ever.  I  may  add,  just  to 
provide  a  pleasing  anti-climax,  that  a  biographical 
introduction  and  a  few  notes  would  have  been 
welcome  in  this  edition. 

102 


A  CRITIC 

JULES  LEMAITRE,  who  died  during  the  war, 
was  amongst  the  first  French  writers  of  his 
time.  But  though  he  wrote  stories,  and  stories  of 
great  charm,  he  was  in  the  first  instance  a  critic, 
not  a  professional  noveUst.  The  resuh  is  that  during 
his  Hfetime  he  was  in  England  almost  completely 
unknown.  Anatole  France  had  been  read  here  for  a 
generation  before  a  single  book  by  the  contemporary 
who  was,  in  mind  and  manner,  nearest  to  him  had 
been  translated.  Mr.  Evans  has  now,  however, 
followed  up  his  translation  of  Serenus  with  an  ad- 
mirable version  of  some  of  the  essays  in  the  eight 
volumes  of  Lemaitre's  "  Les  Contemporains." 

Mr.  Evans  has  made  his  selection  wisely.  He  has 
chosen  essays  on  subjects  not  too  strange  to  the 
larger  cultivated  pubhc.  Anatole  France,  Bourget, 
Maupassant,  Zola,  Renan,  Loti,  Taine,  George 
Sand,  Bernhardt,  de  Sevigne,  Joubert,  Virgil,  Thomas 
k  Kern. pis  :  there  is  not  one  of  these  on  whom  a 
number  of  essays  by  Englishmen  could  not  be 
found  ;   even  Joubert  has  had  his  meed. 

These  papers,  some  of  them  very  short,  are  as 
illuminating  and  delightful  as  any  Hterary  essays 
ever  written.  Lemaitre  was  not  primarily  a  pro- 
pagandist of  good  but  neglected  literature,  he  was 
not  (Uke  Leigh  Hunt)  a  standard-bearer  of  the 
promising  young,  and  he  was  not  (like  Matthew 
Arnold)  very  concerned  with  moral  causes.  He  took 
his  subjects  where  he  found  them,  often  from  among 
the  acknowledged  great.  Anything  that  aroused  his 

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curiosity  did  ;  how  did  he  react  to  '*  Boule-de-Suif," 
the  ''  Mariage  de  Loti,"  or  ''  Germinal  "  ;  what 
things  in  them  attracted,  amused,  moved,  or  re- 
pelled him  ?  That  was  what  concerned  him  ;  that 
and  the  elegant  transmission  of  his  impressions.  He 
was  avowedly  preoccupied  with  description  rather 
than  with  judgment  ;  but  the  personaHty  which 
entered  into  his  descriptions  was  a  very  peculiar 
one,  whimsical  and  tender,  very  acute  of  percep- 
tion, masking  a  good  deal  of  hankering  under  an 
ironic  exterior.  He  was  eminently,  in  his  scepticism, 
a  creature  of  his  time  ;  but  he  was  far  more  un- 
comfortable with  it.  Even  when  celebrating  the 
powers  and  reflecting  the  doubts  of  his  contempo- 
raries he  often  betrayed  an  imphcit  disUke  of  them. 
Almost  every  reference  to  *'  this  age  "  (i.e.y  the  last 
age)  :  to  its  '*  stoic  pessimism,"  its  "  ironical  resig- 
nation," its  "  strange  mania  for  making  out  the 
world  very  ugly  and  very  brutal,"  reflects  a  regret 
which  he  did  not  care  to  elaborate.  He  salutes  Zola 
as  "  an  epic  poet,"  but  he  did  not  end  with  the  phrase 
**  a  pessimist  epic  of  human  animalism  "  without 
letting  the  reader  see  that  he  was  more  uncomfort- 
able about  it  than  Zola  was.  This  clash  of  elements 
in  him  made  him  unique  among  the  critics  of  his 
time  ;  he  was  of  the  company  of  Anatole  France, 
but  his  secret  soul  was  with  Joan  of  Arc.  His  writing 
is  always  delicious  ;  natural,  yet  very  precise,  full 
of  odd  turns,  quiet,  vivid,  and  admirably  decked 
with  quotations.  In  retrospect  it  may  be  seen  that 
he  was  almost  always  right.  .  .  . 

"  Oh,  no,"  says  Lemaitre,  "  don't  say  I  am  right, 
don't  indeed  !  "   In   his   introduction,   Mr.   Evans 

104 


A  CRITIC 

gives  an  account  of  Lemaitre's  and  Anatole  France's 
controversy  with  Brunetiere  as  to  the  nature  and 
objects  of  criticism.  "  To  Brunetiere 's  almost 
pathetic  assertions  that  criticism  to  be  of  any  value 
must  be  '  objective  '  ;  that  the  difference  between 
a  good  work  of  art  and  a  bad  one  could  only  be  deter- 
mined by  reason  and  comparison,  and  that  the  critic 
must  go  by  fixed  standards,  Anatole  France  repHed 
by  denying  the  possibility  of  '  objective  '  criticism, 
smiling  at  reason,  and  flouting  the  fixity  of  any  such 
critical  standards."  Lemaitre  said  that  his  own 
method  was  simply  to  define  and  explain  the  im- 
pressions that  he  received  from  works  of  art  : 

When  the  impressionist  critic  has  thus  ex- 
pounded his  doctrine  of  universal  relativity  and 
has  explained  that,  as  he  is  imprisoned  in  his  own 
personality,  there  is  no  standard  to  which  he  may 
refer  his  own  opinions  or  those  of  others,  he  may 
be  asked  to  state  what  then  is  the  value  of  criti- 
cism. To  this  M.  Lemaitre  replies  that  to  become 
acquainted  with  the  sensations  aroused  in  another 
personality  by  reading  a  book  that  pleases  is  to 
prolong  and  intensify  our  own  sensations. 

'*  I  assure  you,"  said  Lemaitre,  "it  is  possible  for 
me,  as  for  other  people,  to  judge  on  principles  and 
not  on  impressions.  Only  if  I  did  so  I  should  not  be 
sincere.  I  should  say  things  of  which  I  should  not 
be  sure,  whilst  I  am  sure  of  my  impressions."  But 
is  there  nothing  more  that  a  critic  can  do  unless  he 
care  to  erect  a  body  of  artificial  laws  to  which  liter- 
ature must   conform,   and  insists  that  the  unities 

105 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

must  be  preserved,  "  correctness  "  maintained, 
morality  respected,  immorality  eschewed,  and  so 
forth  ?  Has  he  no  alternative  ?  Must  he  choose  be- 
tween a  renunciation  of  judgment  and  the  claim  to 
possess  an  infallible  yard-measure  of  principle  ? 

Few  men  live  thoroughly  up  to  their  theories, 
and  behind  Jules  Lemaitre's  essays  one  can  fre- 
quently trace  the  conviction  that  he  is  giving  some- 
thing more  than  a  personal  impression  worth  no 
more  than  any  other  personal  impression.  But  the 
sceptical  theory  simply  amounts  to  this  :  what  is 
one  man's  meat  is  another  man's  poison,  and 
everything  in  the  world  may  be  both  meat  and 
poison.  "  I  think  X  is  good,  you  think  it  is  bad  ;  we 
cancel  out."  The  position  is  certainly  difficult  to 
attack.  But  it  does  rather  call  to  mind  the  flushed 
Freshman  who  has  made  his  first  stumble  over  the 
frontier  of  philosophy  and  takes  up  every  casual 
assertion  of  knowledge  with  "  How  do  you  know 
you  know  anything  ?  "  We  may  grant  that  we  are 
in  the  dark  about  absolutes,  and  it  is  difficult  to 
dispute  about  tastes.  We  may  reaUse  how  standards 
change  and  how  intelligent  men  differ.  But  a  critic 
may,  if  he  choose,  still  endeavour  to  make,  without 
dishonesty,  pronouncements  which  are  something 
more  than  the  records  of  personal  impressions  and 
judgments  which  are  more  than  confessions  of  taste. 
Let  us  rule  out  the  question  of  absolute  validity  ; 
the  fact  remains  that  mankind  has  been  agreed  in 
designating  as  the  best  literature  that  which  has 
retained,  humanly  speaking,  a  permanent  hold  upon 
readers.  It  may  quite  easily  be  admitted  that  works 
with  many  great  qualities  may  die  young  ;   perhaps 

io6 


A  CRITIC 

they  serve  an  immediate  purpose,  strongly  move  a 
large  body  of  contemporaries,  but  are  crowded  with 
ossifying  topical  references.  It  may  be  admitted, 
again,  that  to  milKons  of  people  Mrs.  Henry  Wood 
was  a  greater  writer  than  Mr.  Meredith.  Put  in  all 
the  reservations.  The  fact  remains  that  in  the  world 
in  which  critics  live  and  for  which  they  chiefly  write 
the  prime  interest  of  a  work  of  art  lies  in  its  chances 
of  "  lasting."  Yes  ;  it  may  be  taking  the  credit  and 
letting  the  cash  go.  Also,  as  Anatole  France  is  so 
often  at  pains  to  remark,  the  world  will  some  day 
grow  cold,  and  Homer  and  Mr.  Garvice  will  lie  in 
the  same  bed. 

The  source  of  our  preoccupation  here  is  as  dark 
as  everything  else  about  us.  But,  under  that  mys- 
terious and  menacing  cope  we  must  have  our 
toys,  and  we  may  amuse  ourselves  with  admiring 
"  immortal  "  literature  as  well  as  in  any  other  way, 
and  it  is  possible,  without  presumption  and  without 
dreaming  of  reaching  infallible  "  principles,"  to 
escape  to  some  extent  the  completely  anarchistic 
and  personal  attitude  of  Jules  Lemaitre.  A  critic 
may,  not  too  sternly,  not  with  any  hope  of  arriving 
at  certainty,  but  with  good  hope  of  discovering 
some  elements  of  truth  and  evolving  "  tests  "  of  at 
least  provisional  value,  regard  literature  from  an 
historical  and  scientific  point  of  view.  Every  reviewer 
who  says  "  I  do  not  think  this  book  will  last  "  is 
unconsciously  referring  to  an  opinion  formed  as  a 
result  of  his  study,  however  fragmentary  that  may 
have  been,  of  the  works  of  the  past  which  actually 
have  "  lasted."  Man's  nature  may  change  :  the 
amoeba  was  and  the  superman  may  be  :   and  we  feel 

107 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

little  kinship  with  either.  But  if  our  historical  epoch 
be  isolated  we  may  assemble  literary  facts  and  make 
deductions  from  them,  just  as  any  other  kind  of 
scientist  does  with  facts  of  another  kind.  We  may 
find  that  in  a  particular  category  of  '*  lasting  "  works 
of  art  one  or  two  nameable  elements  have  always 
been  present  ;  their  absence  in  something  profess- 
ing to  be  a  candidate  for  their  company  gives  one 
ground  for  a  judgment,  if  not  for  a  judgment  for 
which  we  can  (or  need)  claim  infallibility.  There  is, 
for  instance,  something  more  than  a  personal  im- 
pression that  "  Dada  poetry  "  (an  extreme  example) 
will  not  *'  live."  Casually  we  all  make  this  sort  of 
judgment,  with  more  or  less  of  undeliberate  in- 
vestigation behind  it.  It  might  be  made  far  more 
systematically  ;  works  admitted  to  retain  an  active 
life  after  a  hundred,  or  five  hundred,  years,  may  be 
set  apart,  sorted,  analysed  ;  and  most  interesting 
and  valuable  results  may  flow  from  such  a  study, 
powerful  weapons  given  to  critics  who  do  feel  a 
little  more  need  for  dogmatising  than  was  felt  by 
M.  Lemaitre.  .  .  . 

All  the  same,  I  think  we  can,  after  all,  leave  it  to 
the  Germans  to  do  the  job  thoroughly. 


io8 


MR.  GOSSE'S  CRITICISMS 

MR.  GOSSE'S  Books  on  the  Table  is  com- 
posed of  weekly  reviews  contributed  to  a 
Sunday  newspaper.  It  is  as  delightful  and  illumin- 
ating as  any  in  the  long  series  of  its  predecessors. 
Let  us  consider  what  this  means. 

When  I  had  finished  the  book  I  sat  down  to  reflect 
upon  the  limitations  under  which  Mr.  Gosse  must 
work  ;  to  imagine  what  it  must  be  like  to  write  a 
weekly  column  and  a  half  about  literature,  with 
especial  reference  to  new  books.  I  think  I  have  some 
dim  apprehension  of  the  difficulties  of  doing  the 
work  well  at  all,  and  especially  of  doing  it  in  such  a 
manner  that  one's  articles  shall  be  not  merely  read- 
able after  breakfast,  when  the  newspaper  reader  has 
exhausted  the  political,  the  sporting  and  (possibly) 
the  financial  pages,  but  that  they  shall  still  have  some 
savour,  some  appearance  of  value,  when  they  are 
reprinted  in  book  form.  In  the  first  place  there  must 
be  (as  I  conjecture)  the  difficulty  of  a  subject.  Some- 
times the  subject  is  ready-made,  as  when  a  book  of 
the  quality  of  Mr.  Gosse 's  own  comes  out,  or  some 
work  like  Mr.  Lytton  Strachey's,  which  the  critic 
could  not  escape  even  if  he  would.  But  often  enough 
a  week  must  go  by  which  sees  the  production  of  no 
book  of  surpassing,  or  even  tolerable  merit,  and  no 
book  concerning  any  "  Htcrary  figure  "  whose  per- 
sonality and  powers  provoke  enthusiasm  and 
curiosity.  Beyond  this  difficulty  there  are  the  diffi- 
culties of  Time  and  Space.  On  some  prearranged 
day  of  the  week,  I  suppose,  a  man  in  Mr.  Gosse 's 

109 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

position  is  expected  to  deliver  his  ''  copy."  "  Rarely, 
rarely  comest  thou,  Spirit  of  Delight  "  is  a  com- 
plaint which  has  been  echoed  by  all  literary  artists, 
but  it  would  be  precious  little  use  saying  it  to  an 
editor  or  a  printer,  especially  over  the  telephone. 
The  calendar  must  be  obeyed,  and  I  daresay  that 
there  are  times  when  the  day  of  delivery  seems  to 
recur  with  a  malignant  rapidity.  And  when  the  im- 
pulse does  come  it  is  at  least  conceivable  that  the 
prearranged  amount  of  space  may  often  seem  very 
like  a  strait-waistcoat.  Take  the  instance  of  a  con- 
temporary not  yet  sufficiently  known  to  the  public  ; 
there  must  often  be  in  the  critic's  mind  an  uncer- 
tainty as  to  whether  to  suppress  necessary  quotations 
from  his  author  or  comment  by  himself  which  he 
cannot  but  feel  to  be  almost  equally  indispensable. 
All  these  suppositions,  as  I  say,  arose  in  mind  when 
I  contemplated  Mr.  Gosse's  book.  And  I  cannot 
but  marvel  that  papers  which,  when  I  read  them 
first,  seemed  to  me  excellent,  and  often  very  topical, 
journalistic  columns  should  read  now  as  though 
they  had  been  composed  at  leisure  and  with  a  single 
eye  to  publication  in  a  permanent  form.  Mr.  Gosse 
has  not  split  the  difference  between  reviewing  and 
criticism,  journalism  and  literature  ;  he  has  abol- 
ished it. 

It  would  be  an  impertinence  at  this  time  to  call 
attention  to  the  range  of  Mr.  Gosse's  erudition.  In 
this  volume  he  is  equally  at  his  ease  with  Ausonius 
and  Mrs.  Asquith,  Guevara,  Goethe,  Mr.  de  la 
Mare,  and  Miss  Daisy  Ashford,  and  the  index  of 
persons  and  books  to  whom  and  which  he  makes 
reference  fills  ten  closely-printed  pages.  Nevertheless 

no 


MR.  GOSSE'S  CRITICISMS 

he  has  no  trace  of  that  maddening  habit — too 
common  amongst  people  who  know  anything  at 
all — of  dragging  in  scraps  of  learning  merely  for 
the  sake  of  showing  that  he  possesses  them.  Learn- 
ing is  for  use  and  for  ornament,  not  for  parrot-like 
repetition  on  parade,  and  the  profoundest  of  literary 
critics  have  worn  their  knowledge  most  Hghtly.  And 
when  I  say  knowledge  I  do  not  mean  that — although 
in  some  departments  he  is  a  specialist — Mr.  Gosse 
knows  more  than  any  man  living  about  Shakespeare's 
commas  or  the  manuscripts  of  Dante.  He  is  a  scholar; 
but  he  is  not  primarily  a  scholar  :  he  is  a  critic  to 
whom  the  researches  of  scholars  are  useful  material 
towards  the  formation  of  judgments  on  life  and  art  ; 
he  is  a  bibUographer  and  collector  who  does  not  take 
his  pursuits  with  undue  seriousness.  He  has  spent  a 
good  deal  of  his  life  with  an  open  book  before  him, 
but  he  has  never  lost  sight  of  the  relation  between 
books  and  life. 

This  volume  is  naturally  for  the  most  part  critical. 
Possibly  the  most  signal  of  Mr.  Gosse 's  gifts  is  his 
power  of  analysing  the  persons  and  describing  the 
events  that  he  has  seen,  but  the  portraits  and  the 
reminiscences  in  this  volume  are  only  incidental. 
Half  his  contents  would  be  well  described  by  his 
old  title  of  "  Gossip  in  a  Library,"  half  derives 
from  a  consideration  of  poems,  essays,  and  "  Lives  " 
produced  in  our  own  time.  Not  novels.  Mr.  Gosse 
obstinately  refuses  to  yield  to  the  common  delusion 
that  the  novel  is  necessarily  the  most  important 
product  of  contemporary  art,  merely  because  the 
circulating  Hbraries  are  chiefly  stocked  with  it.  He 
will  deal  with  such  novels  as  are  really  worth  his 

III 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

attention  ;  the  mere  ''  novel  of  the  week  "  he  looks 
at  with  a  blank  stare.  Literature  in  his  hands  never 
loses  its  dignity  ;  but  it  must  be  confessed  that 
litterateurs  sometimes  lose  theirs.  For  he  belongs  to 
a  race  of  critics  commoner  in  France  than  here.  He 
never  abandons  himself  to  an  author.  He  does  not 
look  down  on  the  tribes  of  men  ;  he  stands  a  Uttle 
apart  and  examines  them  with  shrewd  and  level 
eyes.  And  even  the  greatest,  thus  considered  by  a 
man  who  is  not,  however  exquisite  his  aesthetic 
appreciations,  blinded  by  his  ecstasies,  are  liable 
to  display  certain  asinine  attributes.  It  is  Mr.  Gosse's 
distinction  that  he  can  see  and,  for  our  delectation, 
transcribe  these  without  the  slightest  forgetfulness 
of  his  main  business,  or  the  least  risk  of  lampooning. 
The  whole  time  he  knows  perfectly  what  he  is 
doing.  The  coolness  of  Mr.  Gosse's  judgment  is 
reflected  in  the  quality  of  his  prose.  It  is  quiet,  even, 
very  compact,  full  of  brief  felicities  of  phrase,  and 
it  has  an  agreeable  tinge  of  acidity.  He  says  in  his 
paper  on  Lady  Ritchie  that  '*  the  dish  of  banana 
fritters  is  delicious,  but  too  sweet  ;  a  dash  of  lemon 
would  vastly  improve  it."  His- own  banana  fritters 
never  lack  the  dash,  but  they  are  never  drowned 
with  the  flavouring.  No  one  could  convey  condem- 
nation or  ridicule  in  fewer  or  more  temperate  words  ; 
he  can  knock  a  man  down  with  a  debonair  touch. 
'*  It  is,"  he  says  of  one  book,  "  felicitous  in  expres- 
sion, and  chivalrous  in  sentiment,  but  it  does  not 
make  any  strong  impact  on  the  attention."  Here,  as 
in  the  confection  of  certain  cordials,  the  sugar  has 
been  merely  rubbed  against  the  outside  skin  of  the 
lemon.  How  agreeably  he  says  that  **  Villon  was  a 

112 


MR.  GOSSE'S  CRITICISMS 

very  great  poet  ;  he  was  also  a  rogue  and  a  robber, 
who  committed  murder  too  often  for  the  occurrence 
to  be  an  accident,"  and  that  "  In  1861  Clough  read 
*  Mari  Magno  '  to  Tennyson,  and  cried  Hke  a  child 
over  it.  We  are  not  told  whether  Tennyson  wept," 
and  that  "  People  who  argue  that  Shakespeare  can- 
not have  existed  because  we  know  so  little  about  his 
life,  will  be  pained  to  observe  that  we  know  still  less 
about   Massinger's."   Of  M.    Claudel,   he   remarks 
that  "  His  new  piece  is  entitled  '  Le  Pere  Humilie,' 
but  if  I  am  asked  why,  it  is  I  who  am  humiliated, 
for  I  have  not  the  least  idea,"  and  of  a  venerable 
but  archaistic  English  writer  that  "  Mr.  Doughty 
is  very  fond  of  '  derne  '  ;    his  pilgrims  are  all  sud- 
denly dasht  on  a  derne  cliff.  It  sounds  like  a  mild 
American    expletive."    Every    essay    he    wTites    is 
sprinkled  with  comments  like  these,  which  produce 
in  the  reader  a  silent  grin  of  enjoyment.  He  scorns 
phrase-making,  but  there  is  no  living  writer  whose 
phrases  are  more  adequate  or  more  flavoured  with 
personality.  And  this  extends  to  his  imagery.  What- 
ever the  tenour  of  his  argument,  he  is  liable  to  drop 
into  an  easy  and  compact  metaphor,  grotesque  or 
charming,   with  the   right   imaginative   touch.    He 
speaks   of  two   forgotten   novels   as   "  those  faded 
romances  whose  very  names  now  sound  dim  and 
faint,  like  the  tunes  of  a  hurdy-gurdy  heard  in  the 
evening  three  streets  off."  Of  the  romantic  gener- 
ation of  critics  he  says  that  '*  Those  who  marched 
with  flags  to  fling  themselves  at  the  feet  of  Webster 
merely   touched    their    sombreros    Hghtly    as    they 
hurried  past  the  figure  of  Massinger,"  and  he  sums 
up  the  whole  saintly  failure  of  Clough  when  he 

113  I 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

remarks  that  "  he  sat  counting  the  pulse  of  his  own 
conscience  until  he  heard  no  other  sound."  And  how 
better  could  he  have  conveyed  the  strange  thrills 
which  the  biblipohile  would  feel  in  the  presence  of 
certain  rare  pamphlets  than  by  this  brief  comparison  : 
**  Anyone  casually  lighting  upon  any  of  these  will 
be  Hke  a  sportsman  who  penetrates  the  brushwood 
of  New  Zealand  and  stalks  a  living  moa." 

These  essays  are  delightful  for  their  information, 
for  their  criticisms,  for  the  biographical  and  auto- 
biographical peeps  into  the  past  which  Mr.  Gosse 
so  often  allows  himself,  and,  as  I  have  said,  for  the 
charm  and  pungency  of  their  detail.  But  their  merits 
of  style  go  beyond  their  separate  sentences.  They 
generally  have  form,  a  considered  outline,  effective 
beginnings  and  effective  endings.  And  at  intervals 
Mr.  Gosse  rises  into  sustained  eloquence.  Eloquence 
is  not  his  metier.  It  pertains  chiefly  to  the  enthusiast, 
the  man  who  surrenders  himself,  and  however  Mr. 
Beerbohm  may  see  fit  to  delineate  Mr.  Gosse  he 
will  never  draw  him,  I  think,  with  whirling  arms, 
shouting  himself  red  in  the  face.  The  style  is  the 
man,  and  Mr.  Gosse 's  style  is  normally  crisp.  But 
his  sentences  join  ;  he  has  his  swifter  moments  even 
if  he  does  elevate  restraint  into  a  high  place  among 
the  literary  and  other  virtues.  I  do  not  see  how  I 
could  better  illustrate  what  he  can  do  at  times  with 
the  paragraph  than  by  quoting  his  last  words,  quick 
in  movement  though  packed  with  the  results  of  re- 
flection, on  Donne  : 

The  world,  therefore,  is  to  be  excused  if,  while 
clasping  Donne  to  its  heart  as  a  poet,  it  has  been 

114 


MR.  GOSSE'S  CRITICISMS 

content  to  take  him  for  granted  as  a  prose-writer. 
He  wrote  most  detestable  prose  in  an  age  which 
had  not  yet  strained  the  language  of  common  life 
through  the  jelly-bag.  All  the  torrent  which  poured 
from  his  lips  as  he  stood,  a  monument  of  awful 
death  in  Hfe,  in  his  pulpit  in  the  old  Gothic 
Cathedral  of  St.  Paul's  was  turbid  with  the  refuse 
of  scholastic  Latin,  and  stained  with  the  experi- 
ments of  an  EngUsh  still  unrefined.  After  all,  when 
people  like  Taine  speak  of  the  great  English 
divines  as  a  sort  of  ichthyosaurians  wallowing  in 
the  slime  of  their  own  obscure  diction,  we  may 
recall  that  the  mundane  and  playful  writers  of 
that  age,  like  Dekker  and  Rowlands,  are  not  more 
Hmpid  nor  much  easier  to  read  than  the  theo- 
logians. The  fact  is  that,  with  a  few  bright  ex- 
ceptions, prose  did  not  exist  in  any  real  lucidity 
and  grace  until  the  middle  of  the  century,  and 
English  style  had  no  Calvin  to  clarify  its  cloudiness 
till  Jeremy  Taylor  rose  in  all  his  splendour.  Donne 
is  perhaps  worse  than  the  rest  in  certain  qualities 
and  relations,  but  he  is  better  than  almost  all  at 
certain  moments  of  inspiration  and  glory. 

It  is  already  some  time  since  Mr.  Gosse  celebrated 
his  seventieth  birthday.  This  book  is  a  proof  not 
merely  of  an  uncanny  and  almost  unexampled  power 
in  him  of  preserving  his  youth,  and,  often,  bettering 
the  achievements  of  his  mature  manhood,  but  also 
of  his  rare  and  whole-hearted  devotion  to  and  pride 
in  the  art  of  letters. 


115 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 

PROFESSOR  BROWN  teaches  Rhetoric  and 
Composition  in  Carleton  College.  His  title- 
page  informs  us  that  he  is  the  author  of  "  How  the 
French  Boy  Learns  to  Write."  But  the  present  book, 
The  Writer's  Art,  is  almost  entirely  the  work  of  other 
authors  :  HazHtt,  Emerson,  Stevenson,  Thoreau, 
Diderot,  Maupassant,  Poe,  and  other  artists  who 
have  discussed  composition.  The  collection  is 
primarily  meant  for  "  college  use,"  and  it  is  sympto- 
matic of  certain  recent  developments  in  the  American 
academic  world. 

Instruction  in  the  practice  of  composition  is  now 
commonly  given  in  many  American  Universities, 
and  there  are  signs  of  its  approach  here.  I  have  heard 
of  an  American  lady  who  took  her  Ph.D.  in  Short 
Story  Writing.  Manuals  on  that  art  abound  in 
America.  The  kinds  of  short  stories  are  classified, 
modes  of  progression  are  analysed,  and  lists  which 
purport  to  be  exhaustive  of  permissible  "  ingre- 
dients "  are  set  down.  I  have  not  yet  seen,  though  I 
am  prepared  to  believe  in  their  existence,  handbooks 
on  the  composition  of  poetry,  but  an  extensive 
literature  is  available  for  aspiring  dramatists,  and 
works  of  a  general  character  which,  like  the  present 
anthology,  are  intended  to  assist  the  writer,  in  what- 
ever kind,  to  know  himself  and  perfect  his  ex- 
pression, are  numerous.  In  this  country  students 
of  English  are  being  more  and  more  encouraged  to 
*'  show  up  "  original  compositions,  and  teachers 
like    Sir    Arthur    Quiller- Couch   are    propounding 

ii6 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 

from  lecture  platforms  those  elementary  principles 
of  good  writing  which  are  commonly  agreed  upon 
by  good  writers  conscious  of  the  nature  of  their  own 
activities. 

I  do  not  know  that  ''Q"  or  his  colleagues  have 
ever  supposed  or  suggested  that  their  maxims  would 
lead  to  an  increase  in  the  production  of  good  litera- 
ture. Their  practice  is  defensible  without  resort  to 
that  contention.  Nobody  can  deny  that  even  econ- 
omists, philosophers,  civil  servants,  and  business 
men  would  be  better  for  the  acquisition  of  a  sound 
EngHsh  style.  Sir  Arthur,  following  in  the  steps  of 
Hazlitt,  Stevenson,  and  the  rest,  demands  accuracy, 
lucidity,  the  concrete  word  rather  than  the  abstract, 
the  suppression  of  superfluous  epithets,  the  elimi- 
nation of  cliches.  No  contributor  to  a  Blue  Book 
but  would  be  better  for  the  adoption  of  these 
counsels.  Whether  the  inculcation  of  them  to  the 
undergraduate  population  at  large  will  lead  to  a 
general  raising  of  the  level  of  wTitten  English,  re- 
mains to  be  discovered.  It  is  at  least  conceivable 
that  nobody  really  comprehends  this  kind  of  teach- 
ing except  those  who  have  no  need  of  it.  I  doubt 
this  ;  I  am  even  prepared  to  believe  that  the  prac- 
tice of  formal  composition  in  English  may  assist 
men  to  read  intelligently,  just  as  the  practice  of 
Latin  verse— hallowed  by  long  tradition — is  ad- 
mitted to  have  increased  men's  enjoyment  of  their 
classics.  But  when  it  comes  to  the  view  that  "  literary 
artists,"  as  they  are  called,  may  be  increased  in 
number  by  University  courses  we  are  on  other 
ground.  Professor  Brown  disclaims  the  notion  that 
the  whole  secret  of  Hterature  can  be  analysed,  set 

117 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

down,  and  transferred.  But  he  is  remarkably  opti- 
mistic all  the  same.  "  If,"  he  says,  "  we  are  to  have 
groups  of  young  writers  who  shall  contribute  any- 
thing -to  American  letters,  they  must  receive,  in 
addition  to  basic  instruction,  a  variety  of  quickening 
suggestion,  in  order  that  they  may  always  be  open- 
minded  and  imbued  with  an  undying  intellectual 
curiosity."  That  strange  sentence  is  succeeded  by 
another  even  stranger.  It  deserves  the  prominence 
of  an  *'  indent  "  : 

Very  few  colleges  or  universities  encourage 
teachers  to  improve  their  teaching  by  becoming 
creative  writers. 

There  it  is,  baldly.  The  teachers  are  to  become 
'*  creative  writers  " — the  taught — the  young  writers 
whose  technical  training,  he  says,  is  so  inferior  to 
that  of  the  young  engineers — are  to  receive,  en 
masse,  basic  instruction  and  quickening  suggestion. 
They  are  there  in  crowds  :  student-men  of  letters 
with  men  like  Professor  Brown  pouring  into  them 
all  the  best  precepts  of  the  best  writers,  examining 
for  them  the  best  French,  English,  and  ancient 
models,  pruning  and  clipping  the  first  productions 
of  their  craft.  Teachers  and  students  are  equally 
eager  that  the  next  generation  of  American  writers 
should  be  a  credit  to  their  country.  But  when  all 
this  labour  has  been  given  time  to  produce  results, 
when  the  latest  race  of  students  have  gone  out  into 
the  world,  may  a  new  movement  be  expected  ? 
When  the  pie  is  opened  will  the  birds  really  begin 
to  sing  ? 

ii8 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 

Do  not  expect  it.  Men  and  writers  may  be  taught 
much.  To  take  a  small  and  obvious  example,  an 
American  student  might  be  persuaded  not  to  use 
*'  some  "  as  an  adverb,  and  if  he  were  persuaded 
he  would  have  been  benefited.  Every  man  has  faults 
of  expression,  habitual  woolly  and  slipshod  phrases, 
words  which  he  uses  in  wrong  senses  ;  much  may 
be  done  in  the  way  of  purging.  But  the  future  of  our 
literature  does  not  repose  on  the  efforts  of  professors 
to  eliminate  what  our  ancestors  called  incorrect- 
ness. An  intelHgent  man  may,  as  the  result  of  in- 
struction, become  a  competent  tradesman  in  written 
commodities  of  a  humble  kind,  though  even  in  the 
lowest  spheres  of  composition  a  large  part  must  be 
played  by  incommunicable  faculty.  The  writer  of  a 
really  successful  soap  advertisement  must  have  a 
touch  of  genius  of  a  kind  :  imagination,  psycholo- 
gical insight,  sympathy  (however  tinged  with  cyni- 
cism) with  the  thoughts  and  emotions  of  multitudes 
of  people  unseen.  Yet  if  even  in  the  lower  walks  all 
is  not  done  when  certain  minor  faults  have  been 
eliminated,  and  a  shop-finish  produced,  how  is  it 
when  we  are  in  the  world  where  men  write  for  im- 
mortality ?  The  most  constant  and  awful  thoughts 
and  the  deepest  passions  of  men,  the  hopes  they 
have  when  they  are  in  love  and  their  fears  when 
they  contemplate  death,  are  the  themes.  A  variety 
of  characters  are  displayed,  panoramically  and  in 
their  separate  reactions  :  or  a  man  sets  down  his 
own  heart.  The  truth  must  be  seen  and  told,  and  in 
such  actions  that  emotion  is  conveyed  from  writer 
to  reader.  The  fundamental  elements  in  literature 
are  often  enough  insisted  upon  in  the  extracts  given 

119 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

by  Professor  Brown.  Not  merely  have  the  great 
laid  emphasis  upon  them,  but  Professor  Brown  has 
found  them  stated  in  a  leading  article  from  the  New 
York  Suriy  which  I  may  quote  because  of  its  un- 
expectedness : 

You  don't  find  feelings  in  written  words  unless 
there  were  feelings  in  the  man  who  used  them. 
With  all  their  apparent  independence  they  seem 
to  be  little  vessels  that  hold  in  some  puzzHng 
fashion  exactly  what  he  put  into  them.  You  can 
put  tears  into  them  as  though  they  were  so  many 
little  buckets  ;  and  you  can  hang  smiles  along 
them,  hke  Monday's  clothes  on  the  line,  or  you 
can  starch  them  with  facts  and  stand  them  up 
like  a  picket-fence  ;  but  you  won't  get  the  tears 
out  unless  you  first  put  them  in.  Art  won't  put 
them  there.  It  is  Hke  the  faculty  of  getting  the 
quality  of  interest  into  pictures.  If  the  quality 
exists  in  the  artist's  mind,  he  is  likely  to  find  means 
to  get  it  into  his  pictures,  but  if  it  isn't  in  the  man 
no  technical  skill  will  supply  it. 

A  man  may  do  much  for  another  man.  But,  in 
the  literary  as  in  other  worlds,  it  is  of  little  real  use 
to  tell  him  cold-bloodedly  that  honesty  is  the  best 
policy.  A  conviction  that  the  truth  ought  to  be  told, 
and  the  expression  of  it  striven  for,  is  scarcely  a 
matter  to  be  conveyed  by  pedagogics  ;  and  a 
thousand  lectures  about  the  artistic  necessity  of 
sincerity  and  humanity  will  not  unseal  the  fountains 
of  the  heart.  Artistic  genius,  though  often  found  in 
immoral  surroundings,  has  a  moral  quality.  If  a  man 

129 


THE  ART  OF  WRITING 

incapable  of  writing  literature  can  at  all  be  made 
into  a  man  capable  of  it  the  change  will  be  the  result 
of  a  kind  of  conversion.  And  strong  moral  influence 
is  neither  more  nor  less  likely  to  be  exercised  by  a 
teacher  of  Hterature  than  by  a  teacher  of  any  other 
subject — including  theology.  When  the  American 
revival  comes  I  doubt  if  the  schools  will  have  much 
to  do  with  it. 

After  this  digression,  if  it  be  a  digression,  I  will 
return  for  a  moment  to  Professor  Brown's  book.  It 
is  an  admirable  book  of  its  kind.  He  has  gone  far 
afield  for  his  extracts  ;  he  includes,  amongst  other 
things,  Edward  Coplestone's  deUcious  adverse 
review  of  Milton,  and  he  has  made  his  explanatory 
notes  as  short  as  possible.  It  should  be  useful,  and 
it  is  extremely  readable  :  an  anthology  of  good 
prose  w^hich,  since  it  was  made  in  order  to  serve  a 
special  purpose,  contains  none  of  those  familiar 
purple  passages  without  which  no  ordinary  collec- 
tion of  prose  masterpieces  dare  show  its  face  in 
public. 


IZl 


A   METABIOLOGICAL   PENTATEUCH 

IT  would  have  been  a  pity  not  to  use  it  at  the  top 
of  the  page.  I  remember  learning,  when  still 
young  enough  to  think  long  words  amusing,  a  poem 
about  the  adventures  of  *'  an  antediluvian  man  of 
sesquipedalian  height  "  who  met  an  ichthyosaurus. 
Mr.  Shaw's  sub-title  recalls  that  ;  but  he  may  be 
allowed  his  little  jokes.  He  is  far  too  shrewd  a  jour- 
nalist to  employ  these  terms  for  his  main  titles.  No 
sub-editor  on  an  evening  paper  ever  had  a  better 
gift  for  pungent  and  arresting  headlines.  '*  Back 
to  Methuselah  "  is  one  of  the  happiest  conceptions 
he  has  had  ;  it  catches  one  at  once,  and  has  the 
added  advantage  of  meaning  something.  This,  how- 
ever, is  what  the  reader  does  not  understand  im- 
mediately :  there  is,  as  usual,  a  preface  interposed 
between  the  title-page  and  the  play. 

It  is  a  long  preface  and  not  in  every  respect  one 
of  Mr.  Shaw's  best.  The  History  of  Evolutionary 
Thought  is  surveyed,  with  glances  at  the  theatre, 
painting,  politics,  and  theology.  Mr.  Shaw  races 
along  with  fewer  good  witticisms  than  usual  and 
fewer  really  provocative  remarks.  The  sensation  of 
speed  is  enjoyable  at  first.  But  after  a  while  one 
tends  to  drowse  ;  one  ceases  to  notice  the  swift 
succession  of  passing  objects,  and  is  conscious  only 
of  the  rhythmic  rattle  of  the  train.  The  upshot  of  it 
is  that  Creative  Evolution  is  ''  the  genuinely  scientific 
religion  for  which  all  wise  men  are  now  anxiously 
looking."  Our  old  friend,  the  Life  Force,  comes  in 
(he  always  reminds  me,  by  the  way,  of  Gibbon's 

122 


A  METABIOLOGICAL  PENTATEUCH 

sneer  about  ''  the  science,  or  rather  the  language  of 
metaphysics  ")  as  the  motive  power.  The  play  that 
follows  has  a  major  and  a  minor  theme.  The  major 
is  Creative  Evolution  at  work — mind  conquering 
matter.  The  minor  is  a  new  instrument  for  acceler- 
ating the  process.  Men  do  not  live  long  enough  to 
learn  anything.  They  are  children — none  more  so 
than  Mr.  Asquith  and  Mr.  Lloyd  George.  Lamarck 
teaches  that  if  a  species  wants  an}thing  badly  it  will 
get  it.  Men  should  want  to  live  to  the  age  of 
Methuselah,  instead  of  dying  in  their  intellectual 
infancy.  If  they  did  the  evolutionary  movement 
would  proceed  much  more  quickly  and  win  far  more 
commendation  than  it  does  from  Mr.  Shaw. 

Certain  stages  of  it  are  presented  in  Mr.  Shaw's 
five  Acts.  He  begins  with  an  allegorical  picture  of 
Adam  and  Eve  in  the  garden,  and  the  suggestions 
of  the  snake,  whence  came  Death  and  all  our  Woe. 
We  next  come  to  the  present  day,  when  the  theory 
of  voHtional  survival  is  formulated  to  a  pair  of  stupid 
and  incredulous  politicians,  a  curate  and  a  hoyden 
with  bobbed  hair.  Next,  in  2170,  w^e  find  a  man 
actually  surviving  for  three  hundred  years  (persons 
of  normal  age,  in  spite  of  mechanical  advance,  re- 
maining as  foolish  and  greedy  as  ever),  and  finally 
we  come  to  a.d,  31920.  That  is  not  Utopia  ;  Mr. 
Shaw's  only  Perfect  State  is  the  Eternity  of  the 
Spirit.  But  people  are  now  born  from  eggs,  in  a 
condition  corresponding  to  our  condition  at  seven- 
teen ;  they  outgrow  mundane  passions  and  affec- 
tions in  four  years ;  and  the  more  elderly  are  safely 
and  consciously  forwarding  a  further  movement 
away  from  our  present   pHght.  Lilith,  the  dea  ex 

123 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

machina,  at  the  close  proclaims  the  aim  :  **  I  shall 
see  the  slave  set  free  and  the  enemy  reconciled,  the 
whirlpool  become  all  life  and  no  matter." 

The  drama  itself  occupies  267  pages.  At  the  close 
of  the  preface  Mr.  Shaw  says  :  *'  I  am  doing  the 
best  I  can  at  my  age.  My  powers  are  waning  ;  but 
so  much  the  better  for  those  who  found  me  unbear- 
ably brilliant  when  I  was  in  my  prime."  The  ad- 
mission is  so  handsome  and  so  unusual  that  it  seems 
almost  a  pity  that  it  was  unnecessary.  Mr.  Shaw's 
powers  do  not  seem  to  be  waning  at  all.  The  only 
typically  senile  vice  that  he  has  is  the  vice  of  garrulity, 
and  that  in  him,  to  use  the  jargon  which  so  delights 
him,  was  rather  an  inherited  predisposition  than  an 
acquired  habit.  His  jimiors  would  be  perfectly  pre- 
pared to  believe  that,  hke  the  people  in  his  last  act, 
he  was  born  from  an  egg  and  began  discoursing 
when  no  more  than  his  head  was  through  the  shell. 
But  that  his  powers  are  waning  there  is  no  evidence 
at  all  in  this  book.  Those  who  creep  back  to  him  in 
the  belief  that  he  has  become  completely  mild  and 
tame  will  be  disagreeably  surprised.  His  life  differs 
from  his  play  in  this,  that  it  is  not  merely  the  ghost  of 
the  Old  Adam  that  is  appearing  in  the  last  act.  Mr. 
Shaw  is  as  clever,  as  vigorous,  as  cunning,  as  high- 
spirited,  as  flippant,  as  curious  as  ever  he  was.  There 
are  conspicuous  faults  in  this  book.  The  preface, 
for  all  its  merits,  is  rather  inconsecutive,  and  gives 
one  the  feeling  that  although  Mr.  Shaw  habitually 
thinks,  he  seldom  stops  to  think.  His  characters  are 
mostly  sticks  ;  his  appeal  is  almost  continuously  to 
the  intellect  ;  the  text  is  overloaded  with  topical 
references  ;  a  few  passages  are  in  bad  taste  and  many 

124 


A  METABIOLOGICAL  PENTATEUCH 

pages  are  tiresome.  Most  of  the  middle  of  the  play 
might  have  been  taken  for  granted  ;  we  did  not 
want  that  endless  silly  talk  between  Mr.  Lloyd 
George,  Mr.  Asquith,  and  the  rest,  to  help  us  form 
a  conception  of  the  present  limitations  of  humanity; 
some  scene  much  shorter  could  have  furnished  the 
necessary  symbol.  But  there  is  no  reason  to  trace 
any  of  these  things  to  senile  decay. 

Mr.  Shaw's  qualities  and  faculties  are  precisely 
what  they  were  ;  the  faculty  of  being  very  boring 
was  always  amongst  them,  and  he  may  cheer  him- 
self with  the  reflection  that  there  is  no  fault  here, 
large  or  small,  which  cannot  be  paralleled  repeatedly 
from  his  earlier  plays.  I  at  least  feel  that  in  places 
Mr.  Shaw  is  here  surpassing  his  previous  best,  and 
notably  in  the  first  and  last  scenes.  The  whole  play 
may  be  no  more  actable  than  the  second  part  of 
"  Faust  "  or  yesterday's  Times,  but  the  first  act  and 
part  of  the  last  would  be  as  effective  in  the  theatre 
as  anything  that  Mr.  Shaw  has  ever  done.  The 
craftsmanship  of  the  Eden  scene  deserves  the  much- 
abused  epithet,  *'  astonishing  "  ;  every  sentence  is 
revelatory,  and  moves  the  action  forward  ;  and  the 
whole  is  a  genuine  re-creation  of  the  legend.  The 
illusion  is  perfectly  imposed,  and  the  temptation  to 
cheap  cleverness,  which  previous  wits  who  have 
dealt  with  that  story  have  not  resisted,  is  avoided. 
Mr.  Shaw's  sympathy  with  the  Serpent  is  scarcely 
veiled,  but  he  does  not  obscure  his  intellectual  con- 
ceptions with  irrelevant  jests  as  he  has  so  often  done, 
nor  does  he  allow  those  conceptions,  in  their  turn, 
to  smother  the  dramatic  progress  of  his  story.  In 
the  last  act  he  comes  nearer  to  poetry  than  he  has 

125 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

ever  come,  and  in  the  last  pages  nearer  to  awe.  An 
operation  would  have  to  be  performed  on  him  be- 
fore he  could  actually  write  poetry  or  communicate 
awe  ;  but  the  operation  would  cut  something  out, 
not  put  something  in.  There  are  elements  in  his 
composition  which  inhibit  him  from  an  even 
momentary  abandonment  to  love  or  pity  or  aesthetic 
enjoyment,  and  he  is  incapable  of  fear.  He  is  always 
*'  all  there  "  ;  he  possesses  his  subject  and  cannot 
be  possessed  by  it  ;  his  sense  of  humour  is  never  in 
complete  abeyance  ;  the  strain  of  argument  is 
always  present  ;  he  is  too  interested  in  things  in 
general  to  give  his  natural  sympathy  for  individuals 
much  play — being,  like  Nature,  careful  of  the  race, 
but  careless  of  the  single  specimen  ;  he  despises 
the  senses  and,  in  so  far  as  Art  appeals  to  the  senses, 
he  despises  Art.  When  he  uses  the  mechanism  of 
Strephon  and  Amaryllis,  temple  and  bosky  glade 
and  pastoral  dance,  in  the  last  act,  our  constant 
tendency  to  lapse  into  enjoyment  of  the  idyllic 
element  is  checked  by  the  pervasive  sense  of  Mr. 
Shaw's  irony  ;  we  know  he  thinks  that  all  nonsense. 
Even  at  the  close  where,  as  I  have  said,  he  does 
actually  come  near  awe,  he  does  not  quite  achieve 
it  :  for  in  the  imagined  presence  of  the  very  spirit 
of  Nature,  to  whom  he  has  dedicated  himself,  Mr. 
Shaw's  self-possession  and  detachment  remain  :  it 
is  as  it  were  a  theoretical  awe  struggling  to  carry 
conviction.  Nevertheless,  that  scene,  from  the  pro- 
cession of  primaeval  ghosts  to  the  last  eloquent  har- 
angue of  the  symbohc  Lilith,  is  conceived  finely, 
and  constructed  with  extraordinary  skill.  It  leaves 
one  with  a  sense  of  having  had  a  glimpse  of  grandeur. 

126 


A  METABIOLOGICAL  PENTATEUCH 

A  cold  and  pagan  grandeur  ;  but  there  is  Mr. 
Shaw's  philosophy.  He  is  unHke  Mr.  Wells  in  many 
respects,  but  he  is  like  him  in  this,  that  so  long  as 
he  can  regard  himself  as  a  humble  instrument  of 
Evolution  he  is  perfectly  happy.  His  horizon  is 
wider  than  Mr.  Wells's,  and  the  operation  of  his 
revered  process  more  extensive.  Mr.  Wells,  except 
for  an  occasional  dash  into  metaphysics  just  to  show 
that  he  knows  they  are  there,  usually  keeps  his  eyes 
firmly  glued  on  the  earth,  which  was  once  a  whirl- 
ing ball  of  fire.  Time  is  good  enough  for  him,  and  if 
the  upward  cHmb  from  the  amoeba  is  going  to  end 
in  a  material  calamity,  collision  or  cooHng,  he  pre- 
fers not  to  worry  about  it.  He  advocates  our  co- 
operation with  the  biological  movement  as  a  man 
advocates  any  other  measure  of  practical  reform. 
Mr.  Shaw  is  not  satisfied  with  that.  He  has  always 
been  interested  in  the  physical  details  of  current 
evolutionary  science.  He  will  talk  about  Darwin, 
Lamarck,  and  Weismann  until  all's  blue,  and  in  the 
present  preface  he  very  nearly  does.  But  his  Adam 
and  Eve  is  only  a  metaphysical  parable.  He  is  not 
content  to  begin  with  the  amoeba,  or  to  end  with  a 
race  of  very  highly  educated  engineers  who  play 
biUiards  on  board  their  smoothly-running  trains  or 
discover  how  to  fly  to  the  other  planets.  Vegetarian, 
teetotaler,  anti-aesthete,  he  does  not  really  long  to 
increase  material  comforts  or  delights  ;  he  wants 
to  aboHsh  them  and  the  means  of  enjoying  them. 

His  final  blissful  dream  is  of  man  shedding  one 
organ  after  another,  the  foot,  the  hand,  the  head, 
until  he  becomes  pure  spirit  :  Creative  Evolution. 
I  hold  no    brief   for  Mr.  Asquith  or  Mr.   Lloyd 

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George,  but  I  doubt  whether  they  would  be  justified 
in  taking  it  from  Mr.  Shaw  that  the  democracy  has 
given  them  a  mandate  for  this.  No  doubt  they  look 
grotesque  little  objects  when  Mr.  Shaw  exhibits 
them  in  front  of  a  background  of  aeons.  But  it  is  a 
tough  test.  Even  the  majestic  author  of  this  preface 
might  appear  slightly  ridiculous  were  he  conceived 
as  delivering  his  soul  under  the  shadow  of  some- 
thing no  larger  or  more  ancient  than  the  Pyramids 
and  the  Parthenon.  Nevertheless  Mr.  Shaw  has 
attempted  to  formulate  his  view  of  things  and  his 
ideal  ;  and  the  attempt  must  command  respect. 
Even  he,  with  all  his  desire,  has  not  bridged  the 
passage  from  Time  to  Eternity  in  his  exposition  : 
but  the  difficulty  of  relating  two  things,  neither  of 
which  one  can  comprehend,  is  no  new  one.  Mr. 
Shaw  announces  that  he  has  done  his  best  to  provide 
mankind  with  the  Bible  of  a  new  rehgion  :  a  demand 
for  which  has  just  been  made  by  Mr.  Wells.  It  may 
be  taken  for  certain  that  mankind  at  large,  if  it  ever 
hears  of  them,  will  find  his  dogmas  about  life  eternal 
as  vague  as  it  will  find  his  dogmas  on  life  temporal 
unappetising.  Put  it  in  another  manner.  Are  you 
yourself  quite  happy  with  the  notion  of  the  Universe 
as  an  enormous  theatre  where  one  long  Shaw  play 
is  being  acted  ?  I  don't  think  Bibles  are  made  this 
way. 


128 


BYRON 

y4  ST  ARTE  was  first  published  in  1905.  Its 
-^—^  author,  Lord  Lovelace,  was  Byron's  grand- 
son. Its  theme  was  the  guilt  of  Byron  and  his  half- 
sister,  Mrs.  Leigh.  The  first  edition  was  very  small. 
Lord  Lovelace  desired  "  above  all  things  to  avoid 
the  possibility  of  making  money  out  of  the  story  " 
of  his  ancestors,  and  most  of  the  copies  were  given 
away  to  his  friends.  Occasionally  some  of  them  have 
come  into  the  salerooms  and  fetched  as  much  as 
twenty  pounds  each.  The  contents  of  the  book  were 
universally  known,  but  not  generally  accessible. 
This  situation  was  clearly  unsatisfactory,  the  last 
thing  Lord  Lovelace  wanted  being  to  cater  for 
speculators  in  the  chrouique  scandaleiise.  Beyond 
this  there  was  the  fact  that  some  people  held  he  had 
not  fully  proved  his  case,  and  the  family  possessed 
documents,  unpublished  by  him,  which  supple- 
mented his  evidence.  His  widow,  therefore,  has 
now  produced  a  comparatively  cheap  and  enlarged 
edition  through  the  ordinary  publishing  channels. 

What  made  Lord  Lovelace  attempt  so  repellent 
a  task  ?  He  would  have  been  in  ordinary  circum- 
stances the  last  man  to  do  so  ;  a  studious  and  fas- 
tidious man  who  disliked  pubUcity  of  any  kind,  and 
whose  loathing  of  gossip,  prying  journalism,  and 
what  seemed  to  him  the  thousand  squalid  vulgarities 
of  modern  civilisation,  bordered  on  eccentricity. 
Had  the  charge  never  been  made  against  Byron  he 
would  have  been  the  last  to  break  silence.  But  it 
had  been  made,  it  had  been  incompetently  made 

129  K 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

(by  Mrs.  Beecher  Stowe,  who  had,  he  thought, 
betrayed  Lady  Byron's  confidence),  it  had  been 
bitterly  answered  by  Byron's  friends,  who  had 
accused  Lady  Byron  of  coldly  and  cruelly  ruining 
his  life,  and  he  felt  that  justice  demanded  that  Lady 
Byron's  memory  should  be  cleared.  He  could  do 
nothing  for  his  grandfather's  reputation,  but  he 
might  at  least  secure  that  justice  should  be 
done  to  the  innocent  woman  whose  life  his  grand- 
father had  wrecked.  With  great  reluctance,  there- 
fore, he  sorted  his  family  papers — memoranda  by 
Lady  Byron  and  her  friends,  letters  from  Lady 
Byron,  Lord  Byron,  and  Mrs.  Leigh,  and  others, 
unpublished  material  of  every  description — and 
made  out  his  case,  supporting  his  arguments  with 
quotations  from  the  poems. 

His  evidence  will  not  be  analysed  here,  and  it  may 
be  left  to  those  who  like  such  things  to  pad  their 
columns  with  the  most  ardent  sentences,  the  darkest 
hints  and  the  most  suspicious  parentheses  in  the 
letters  which  passed  between  Byron  and  his  half- 
sister.  The  case  made  out  is  undoubtedly  very 
strong,  and  probably  at  this  date  could  not  be 
answered  ;  but,  whatever  may  be  the  temptation 
to  take  the  matter  as  settled,  it  must  in  fairness  be 
admitted  that  the  last  degree  of  proof  is  lacking, 
the  few  direct  sentences  of  testimony  or  confession 
which  would  outweigh  all  the  rest  put  together. 
Lady  Byron's  tenderness  and  goodness  are  certainly 
demonstrated  ;  it  is  also  clear  that  she  believed  her 
husband  guilty  of  the  enormity  ;  and  it  always  has 
been  clear  that  the  Byron  with  whom  she  spent  her 
year  of  married  life  was  a  man  who  gave  her  plenty 

130 


BYRON 

of  reasons  for  leaving  him,  without  recourse  to  that 
now  under  discussion.  He  paraded  his  infidehties, 
and  his  temper  was  so  bad  that  close  observers  be- 
Heved  him  to  be  deranged  ;  wounded  pride  and  his 
great  gift  for  self-pity  accounted  for  the  pathetic, 
half-genuine,  later  protestations  that  she  had  heart- 
lessly deserted  him  ;  he  had  taken  small  pains  to 
make  her  happy  when  she  was  present.  Even  if  we 
assume  every  one  of  Lord  Lovelace's  contentions 
to  be  true,  they  make  little  difference  in  one's  con- 
ception of  Byron's  character.  This  may  seem  an 
extreme  thing  to  say.  But  he  had  one  of  the  most 
puzzling  characters  on  record,  and  in  his  rages  of 
pride,  rebelHon,  and  desire  he  was  capable  of  any- 
thing. 

His  hand  was  against  every  man  and  every  in- 
stitution. He  had  deliberately  willed  not  to  govern 
his  almost  ungovernable  passions.  There  were  things 
he  would  have  shrunk  from  doing.  He  disliked 
lying  (there  seems  to  have  been  a  fear  that  he  would 
even  tell  the  truth  about  his  relations  with  Mrs. 
Leigh,  and  certainly  nothing  but  solicitude  for  her 
would  have  restrained  him),  he  would  never  have 
been  cruel  for  cruelty's  sake,  and  he  was  incapable 
of  an  underhand  plot  against  any  man's  life  or  repu- 
tation. It  was  not  only  **  the  pageant  of  his  bleeding 
heart  "  that  he  was  wiUing  to  trail  across  Europe  : 
Europe  could  know  everything  about  him.  No  doubt 
this  scorn  of  concealment  was  not  mainly  merito- 
rious ;  telling  the  truth  was  one  way  of  securing  the 
"  glory  "  for  which  he  hungered,  and  the  more 
shocking  the  truth,  the  greater  the  glory.  A  more 
lunatic  pride  than  his  has  never  been  known,  and  it 

131 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

was  from  that  that  his  rebelliousness  mainly  sprang. 
Shelley  was  the  rebel  of  love,  Byron  the  rebel  of 
hate  and  contempt.  Shelley  believed  in  a  Utopia, 
Byron  had  no  such  illusions.  He  felt  himself  superior 
to  the  rest  of  mankind  ;  like  Napoleon,  he  conceived 
that  morality  was  not  made  for  him  ;  he  was  Satan 
in  revolt.  The  Biblical  comparison  is  not  inapt.  He 
was  soaked  in  Biblical  phraseology  and  might  have 
used  it  himself  ;  but  beyond  that  there  was  a  strain 
of  belief  in  him.  A  common  egoist  and  roue  does 
not  habitually  employ  terms  like  ''sin,"  '*  guilt,'* 
and  **  crime,"  which  constantly  haunted  Byron's 
mind  and  verses. 

Byron  was  a  paradox  even  more  than  other  men 
are.  He  had  a  conscience  which  never  modified  his 
conduct,  a  refinement  which  could  not  mitigate  his 
coarseness,  a  kindness  which  was  obscured  at  the 
smallest  firing  of  his  pride  or  his  desire,  and,  oddest 
of  all,  a  sense  of  humour  which  never  assisted  him 
to  observe  proportion.  "  Heaven  knows  why," 
wrote  the  exile  from  Geneva,  ''  but  I  seem  destined 
to  set  people  by  the  ears."  If  this  were  serious  it 
would  be  staggering  ;  if  it  be  facetious  it  is  most 
difficult  to  reconcile  conduct  which  was  frequently 
not  that  merely  of  a  reckless  and  cheerful  libertine, 
but  that  of  a  savage,  tigerish,  mad.  All  the  indict- 
ments of  him  ever  written  fade  from  memory  as 
one  reads  the  sunny  cynicism  of  his  letters  and 
"  Don  Juan,"  as  they  do  when  one  comes  across  his 
gentler  lyrics  or  remembers  the  many  stories  of  his 
generosity  and  good  companionship.  He  was  capable, 
sometimes,  even  of  humility  ;  he  said  that  if  people 
only  knew   Shelley's   writings   they  would   realise 

132 


BYRON 

how  second-rate  were  his  own.  According  as  people 
like  his  poetry  or  not,  or  according  as  temperament 
or  caprice  lead  them  to  fasten  upon  one  or  another 
aspect  of  his  career  and  character,  so  they  are  ''  pro  " 
or  ''  con."  Nobody  has  yet  succeeded  (and  few  have 
seriously  attempted  it)  in  reconciling  all  his  aspects. 
Any  full  description  must  always  look  like  a  tessel- 
lated pavement,  with  alternate  squares  of  black  and 
white. 

A  thousand  new  books  will  fail  to  solve  the  riddle, 
and  a  thousand  new  crimes  would  not  entirely 
destroy  the  affection  that  many  people  must  feel  for 
him.  Those  who  were  disgusted  by  his  anger  and 
his  sneers  were  fascinated  again  by  his  smile  ;  those 
who  knew  that  he  exploited  his  charm  could  not 
deny  his  charm  ;  and  it  is  in  death  as  it  was  in  life. 
As  for  his  poetry,  concerning  which  it  is  time  that 
somebody  said  something,  it  may  seldom  be  the 
best  kind  of  poetry,  but  much  of  it  is  Hving  litera- 
ture. Except  in  some  of  the  narratives,  where  un- 
convincing stories  were  rhetorically  told  in  language 
that  seldom  passed  eloquence,  he  always  worked 
on  the  true  materials  of  poetry.  His  sufferings, 
however  self-induced,  were  real,  and  he  had  a 
genuine,  if  not  a  real  passion  for  Nature  ;  he  watched 
the  general  spectacle  of  the  human  world  with 
immense  gusto,  and  he  was  moved  to  awe  by  the 
fundamental  problems  of  existence.  As  a  writer  of 
satirical  verse  it  may  be  maintained  (though  he  him- 
self would  have  regarded  this  as  blasphemy  against 
Pope)  that  he  is  unequalled,  if  combined  quality 
and  quantity  be  considered,  in  our  language.  The 
satirist  in  him — the  same  thing  happened  in  Pope — 

133 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

tended,  as  time  went  on,  to  overmaster  the  rest.  The 
faults  of  his  serious  poetry  are  partly  faults  of  exag- 
geration, natural  to  a  glutton  for  personal  fame  who 
was  desirous  of  impressing  the  grandeur  of  his 
moods  upon  mankind,  and  partly  faults  of  expres- 
sion. He  had,  although  an  immense  gift  for  com- 
pact, neat,  and  antithetical  lines,  a  defective  ear.  His 
dislike  of  the  looser  measures  which  had  superseded 
the  couplet  went  with  an  incapacity  to  use  them 
with  very  much  finesse.  And  he  did  not  care  about 
fine  shades  of  phrasing  ;  the  first  vigorous  words 
which  came  to  his  pen  would  do.  So  immense  a 
production,  considering  his  various  occupations, 
could  scarcely  have  been  managed  otherwise.  The 
consequence  has  been  a  reaction  which  has  accused 
him  of  writing  fustian,  false  rhetoric,  and  jingling 
prose.  But  even  at  his  worst  it  is  difficult  to  stop 
reading  him,  for  the  quickened  pulse  is  behind  what 
he  writes,  and,  with  whatever  lack  of  care,  he  did 
frequently  in  his  heat  express  genuine  sentiments 
with  consummate  naturalness.  Passages  simple, 
sincere,  moving,  reflecting  the  elementary  impulses 
of  the  human  breast,  may  be  found  throughout  his 
works,  from  the  early  affecting  poems  addressed  to 
his  Harrow  friends  to  the  last  lines  he  wrote  at 
Missolonghi  : 

Seek  out — less  often  sought  than  found — 
A  soldier's  grave,  for  thee  the  best  ; 

Then  look  around,  and  choose  thy  ground 
And  take  thy  rest. 

Whatever  he  had  done  he  had  not  been  happy. 
The  lightning  he  had  defied  had  struck  him.  His 

134 


BYRON 

desire  for  peace  was  genuine,  and  at  the  end  he  was 
familiar  with  the  most  pitiful  and  awful  mood  a  man 
can  have — the  mood  in  which  he  does  not  care 
whether  he  lives  or  dies.  At  the  end  he  died  in  a  good 
cause,  and  whatever  may  be  disclosed  about  him 
his  statues  will  stand  about  the  towns  of  Greece. 
What  drove  him  there  ?  Not  an  abstract  passion  for 
liberty,  but  a  romantic  attachment  to  historic  Greece 
and  his  European,  his  almost  John  Bullish,  instincts, 
which  roused  him  to  resist  the  Orient  which  so 
fascinated  him.  He  had  written  about  Marathon  ; 
he  never  lived  to  hear  of  Mustapha  Kemal.  Uncon- 
sciously he  was  a  prominent  figure  in  a  struggle 
which  has  gone  on  for  thousands  of  years,  the 
struggle  between  East  and  West  over  the  body  and 
soul  of  the  Levant.  He  lived  a  scoffer  and  died  a 
Crusader,  and  there  are  some  graves  over  which  it 
becomes  us  to  show  a  little  charity,  though  we 
mustn't,  more  than  we  can  help,  He. 

I  have  got  away  from  "  Astarte."  It  is  a  work  of 
great  labour,  conceived  and  executed  conscientiously. 
But  it  is  rather  a  document  put  in  as  evidence  than 
a  book  which  can  be  recommended  to  those  who 
wish  to  be  edified  or  amused. 


135 


MR.  DE  LA  MARE'S  ROMANCE 

FIVE  years  ago  it  might  still  have  been  de- 
sirable, when  nominally  reviewing  a  book  of 
prose  by  Mr.  de  la  Mare,  to  occupy  oneself  entirely 
with  proclaiming  the  merits  of  his  verse.  This  is 
not  necessary  to-day.  He  stole  very  slowly  and  un- 
obtrusively into  pubUc  notice,  producing  Httle, 
never  adapting  himself  to  an  assumed  public  taste, 
oblivious  to  every  kind  of  advertisement,  content 
to  express  what  was  true  to  him  and  resolved  to 
employ  every  resource  of  his  art  on  every  line  of  his 
work.  But  there  is  now  no  lover  of  poetry  willing 
to  dispute  his  place  among  the  immortals  ;  the 
certainty  of  his  progress  has  equalled  its  tranquillity ; 
he  is  admitted  to  be  as  true  a  poet  and  as  consum- 
mate an  artist  as  any  man  who  ever  wrote  English 
lyrics.  His  prose,  of  which  there  are  several  long 
examples,  is  not  so  widely  known  or  appreciated  as 
''  Motley  "  and  "  Peacock  Pie."  Those  who  think 
that  a  poet  is  wasting  his  time  if  he  takes  serious 
pains  with  anything  but  poetry  will  think  this  fitting. 
But  after  reading  *'  Memoirs  of  a  Midget  "  it  is 
impossible  to  be  wholehearted  in  one's  regret  that 
he  should  have  devoted  years  of  labour  to  so  full 
and  beautiful  a  work. 

A  sketch  of  the  plot  of  this  romance  will  give  a 
very  poor  notion  of  its  nature.  Miss  M.,  the  Midget, 
is  exceedingly  small,  smaller  than  the  common 
dwarf,  almost  elfin  in  size.  She  passes  in  succession 
through  home  Hfe,  Hfe  in  a  small  town,  Kfe  in 
fashionable  London,  then  has  a  brief  turn  in  a  circus, 

136 


MR.  DE  LA  MARE'S  ROMANCE 

and  retires  into  country  peace.  Well,  we  can  con- 
ceive novels  about  dwarfs  :  Dickens  might  have 
written  one,  and  very  comic  and  pathetic  it  would 
have  been.  But  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  book  is  profoundly 
unlike  a  novel  by  Dickens  or  anybody  else.  There  is 
a  story.  There  are  episodes,  such  as  that  of  proud, 
heartless,  beautiful  Fanny  and  the  curate,  which 
might  have  been  conceived  by  another.  But  the 
library  subscriber  who  should  carry  the  book  off 
under  the  impression  that  she  was  taking  an  ordinary 
narrative  fiction  home  w^ould  have  a  shock.  For, 
good  as  are  many  of  the  characters  and  the  events 
that  happen  to  them,  they  are  seen  through  a  lens 
of  whimsicality.  And  the  miain  quality  of  the  book 
is  not  that  it  enlists  our  sympathies  for  particular 
men  and  women,  or  gives  us  a  realistic  presentation 
of  scenes  from  the  human  comedy  as  we  know  it, 
but  that  it  introduces  us  into  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  world, 
and  brings  us  into  contact  with  his  feehngs  about 
the  Hfe  which  detached  Miss  M.  saw^  us  leading 
with  such  pathetic  courage  and  blindness.  It  is  a 
poet's  book.  I  can  think  of  no  prose  book  by  an 
English  poet  which  is  a  more  substantial  achieve- 
ment, but  of  many  in  which  poets  have  escaped  to 
a  greater  extent  from  the  manner  and  matter  of  their 
poetry.  Mr.  de  la  Mare  is  one  and  indivisible.  The 
world  of  his  poetry,  that  strange  assembly  of  pictures 
and  sentiments  drawn  in  from  the  daily  world,  from 
childhood's  memories,  and  from  art,  contains 
elements  familiar  separately  but  nowhere  else  found 
in  such  combination.  He  can  write  of  familiar 
decorative  things,  a  deserted  garden,  or  a  statue  in 
a  fountain,  as  though  nobody  had  ever  seen  them 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

before  :  he  makes  everything  he  touches  his,  and 
he  touches  nothing  to  which  he  does  not  sincerely 
respond.  The  world  of  his  poetry  is  a  quiet  world 
of  moonlight  in  still  places,  of  evening  waters,  of 
gardens,  woods,  and  wild  roses,  of  quiet  parlours 
sleeping  in  sunlight,  of  midnight  silences  broken  by 
small  sounds.  Yet  it  is  a  world  never  made  for 
decoration  ;  it  is  haunted  by  the  most  secret  whispers 
of  the  heart,  and  in  every  corner  of  it  we  encounter 
a  gentle,  bewildered,  suffering  human  spirit.  In  a 
lyric  the  quintessence  of  a  chapter  can  be  given, 
and  made  memorable  by  music.  The  music,  largely, 
has  gone  from  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  prose  ;  but  in  this 
romance  it  is  his  old  world  we  see  again  and  in 
immensely  greater  detail. 

The  book  is  a  close  tissue  of  lovely  images  and 
perfect  phrases.  Every  page  is  crowded,  so  crowded 
that  it  can  be  read  only  slowly  if  the  mind's  eye  will 
see  everything  that  is  presented  to  it  and  the  heart 
receive  every  quiet  message.  But  in  all  this  elabora- 
tion and  complication  of  picture  and  language, 
thought,  and  fancy,  there  is  never  anything  false  or 
faked,  not  a  word  that  is  dishonest,  or  that  strikes 
one  as  having  been  put  in  for  effect.  The  major 
elements  in  our  landscape  are  shown  with  sur- 
passing freshness  :  the  Midget  helps  here,  for  she 
was  secluded  until  grown  up,  and  the  author,  look- 
ing through  her  unaccustomed  eyes,  has  realised 
many  common  things — the  stars  over  a  wood,  the 
sensation  of  being  alone  in  the  fields  at  night,  the 
sea,  trains,  tea-parties,  streets — as  though  they  had 
all  just  broken  on  him  for  the  first  time.  There  are 
countless  little  landscapes,  and  the  stars,  with  their 

138 


MR.  DE  LA  MARE'S  ROMANCE 

noble  names,  Sirius  and  Aquila  and  Aldebaran, 
come  in  as  a  recurring  motive,  pure,  keen,  and  re- 
mote in  the  night.  In  every  chapter  there  are,  as 
there  were  sure  to  be,  vivid  interiors  :  furniture 
shining,  old  women  fussing,  kettles  boiling,  cats 
purring,  candles  reflected  in  mirrors,  moonUght 
ghostly  through  curtains,  and  stairs  creaking  in  the 
darkness.  But  the  most  remarkable  thing  is  the  mul- 
titude of  small  things  seen  and  described  with  loving 
precision.  In  one  of  the  finest  of  his  poems  Mr.  de 
la  Mare  has  mused  on  the  endless  wonders  of 
creation.  Leviathan  and  the  honey  fly,  the  smooth- 
plumed  bird  : 

The  seed  of  the  grass, 
The  speck  of  stone 
Which  the  way-faring  ant 
Stirs — and  hastes  on  ! 

The  illusion  of  size  has  never  blinded  him  ;  the 
small  things  are  much  the  more  numerous  and  the 
more  neglected  ;  he  has  watched  them  and  thought 
on  the  life  within  them.  His  leviathans  are  few  com- 
pared with  his  mice  and  snails  and  spiders,  in  a 
teeming  world  where  every  stone  hides  a  community 
and  every  blossom  has  its  secret  and  peculiar  hiero- 
glyphics. Miss  M.  in  her  latter  retirement  spent  her 
time,  we  are  told,  ''  embroidering  her  brilUant  tiny 
flowers  and  beetles  and  butterflies  with  her  tiny 
needle."  Small  things  had  been  more  clear  to  her 
than  to  us,  and  many  of  her  principal  experiences 
had  come  to  her  through  them.  Cruelty,  death,  and 
decay  broke  upon  her  with  the  manifest  destinies 

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of  mole  and  wren  ;  and  her  first  night  of  fear  reached 
its  cuhnination  with  a  swarm  of  cockroaches, 
**  shelled,  nocturnal,  sour-smelling  creatures  .  .  . 
scurrying  away  into  hiding,  infants  seemingly  to 
their  mothers,  whisper,  whisper."  But  it  is  Mr.  de 
la  Mare's  autobiography  as  well  as  hers  that  we  are 
reading  when  we  get  such  confessions  as  this  : 

Over  such  small  things  as  a  nut,  a  shell,  a  drop 
of  rain-water  in  a  buttercup,  a  pond  of  frost  (for 
there  were  cold  winters  at  Lyndsey  in  those  days), 
I  would  pore  and  pore,  imbibing  the  lesson 
that  the  eye  alone,  if  used  in  patience,  will  tell  its 
owner  far  more  about  an  object  than  it  can  merely 
see. 

So,  when  he  paints  the  sky  in  all  its  transform- 
ations, woods  and  houses  in  all  their  moods,  the 
larger  outlines  always  contain  minute  details  clearly 
seen.  There  are  thousands  of  phrases  which  might 
be  quoted  :  '*  Raying  Hghts  circled  across  the  ceiling, 
as  carriage  and  cart  glided  by  on  the  esplanade  "  ; 
"  a  dwindhng  meteor  silvered  across  space  "  ;  '*  the 
forsaken  sweet  of  the  morning  "...  fruits  of  an 
eye  that  never  fails  to  notice  and  a  memory  that 
always  records.  But  both  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  observa- 
tion and  the  qualities  of  his  prose  may  perhaps  more 
easily  be  illustrated  from  one  of  the  few  sustained 
passages  allowed  himself  by  an  author  who  writes 
beautifully  because  he  writes  exactly  and  affection- 
ately, but  never  aims  at  the  grandiose  set  piece  or 
pads  a  paragraph  to  make  it  the  length  of  the  most 
approved  fine  paragraphs.  This  comes  from  the 
account  of  Miss  M.'s  childhood  when  she  is  under 

140 


MR.  DE  LA  MARE'S  ROMANCE 

the  roof  of  her  father  and  mother  and  beginning  to 
learn  her  universe  : 

My  eyes  dazzled  in  colours.  The  smallest  of 
the  marvels  of  flowers  and  flies  and  beetles  and 
pebbles,  and  the  radiance  that  washed  over  them, 
would  fill  me  with  a  mute,  pent-up  rapture  almost 
unendurable.  Butterflies  would  settle  quietly  on 
the  hot  stones  beside  me,  as  if  to  match  their 
raiment  against  mine.  If  I  proffered  my  hand, 
with  quivering  wings  and  horns  they  would  uncoil 
their  delicate  tongues  and  quaff  from  it  drops  of 
dew  or  water.  A  solemn  grasshopper  would  occa- 
sionally straddle  across  my  palm,  and  with  patience 
I  made  quite  an  old  friend  of  a  harvest  mouse. 
They  weigh  only  two  to  the  halfpenny.  This 
sharp-nosed  furry  morsel  would  creep  swiftly 
along  to  share  my  crumbs  and  snuggle  itself  to 
sleep  in  my  lap.  By-and-by,  I  suppose,  it  took  to 
itself  a  wife  ;  I  saw  it  no  more.  Bees  would  rest 
there,  the  panniers  of  their  thighs  laden  with 
pollen  ;  and  now  and  then  a  wasp,  his  jaws  full 
of  wood  or  meat.  When  sun-beetles  or  ants  drew 
near  they  would  seem  to  pause  at  my  whisper,  as 
if  hearkening,  as  if  in  their  remote  silence  ponder- 
ing and  sharing  the  world  with  me.  All  childish 
fancy,  no  doubt  ;  for  I  proved  far  less  successful 
with  the  humans. 

But  now  that  I  have  pulled  it  from  the  mould,  I  feel 
that  it  somewhat  wilts  and  fades.  It  is  a  delicate  book, 
not  easily  to  be  handled  by  coarse  fingers,  not  even 
as  I  have  said,  easily  to  be  described.  There  is  a 

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wiser  and  sweeter  son  of  Poe  in  it,  and  a  gentler 
brother  of  the  Brontes,  and  a  cousin  of  Hans 
Andersen  :  even  those  traffic  in  the  elusive,  and 
most  of  what  is  here  can  be  indicated  by  no  name 
except  that  of  de  la  Mare,  a  sufficient  label  for  those 
who  know  him,  and  nothing  in  the  world  for  those 
who  do  not.  He  quotes — he  probably  doesn't  know 
how  often  he  has  quoted — -the  old  verses  of  "  Tom 
o'  Bedlam,"  whose  mistress  was  the  moon  : 

With  a  heart  of  furious  fancies, 
Whereof  I  am  commander  ; 

With  a  burning  spear. 

And  a  horse  of  air. 
To  the  wilderness  I  wander. 

W^ith  a  knight  of  ghosts  and  shadows, 
I  summoned  am  to  tourney  ; 

Ten  leagues  beyond 

The  wide  world's  end  ; 
Methinks  it  is  no  journey. 

It  is  no  more  easy  to  catalogue  Mr.  de  la  Mare  than 
it  is  to  analyse  that.  He  has  rich  gifts  of  fancy,  and 
even  of  demure  wit  :  many  others  have  had  as  much. 
He  tells  fairy-tales,  but  how  far  he  is  from  being  a 
luxurious  or  sentimental  dreamer  !  He  plays  with 
toys,  but  conscious  of  impending  calamity  ;  he  takes 
in  impressions  through  every  sense,  but  how  little 
is  he  a  slave  of  the  senses  !  The  most  dominant  thing 
about  him  is  a  thing,  never  paraded  but  always  pre- 
sent :  his  sense  of  the  mystery,  beyond  all  the  super- 
ficial beauty  and  dreadfulness,  of  existence  : 

142 


MR.  DE  LA  MARE'S  ROMANCE 

When  Music  sounds  all  that  I  was  I  am 
Ere  to  this  haunt  of  brooding  dust  I  came. 

Everything,  from  the  stars  to  the  minutest  plants, 
he  sees  against  that  background  of  eternity.  If  he 
dogmatised  about  it  he  would  be  more  easy  to  talk 
about  ;  but  the  one  thing  he  scarcely  ever  expresses 
is  an  opinion.  In  the  recesses  of  his  mind  he  has  his 
prepossessions  ;  though  he  continually  asks  questions 
he  never  has  the  colour  of  a  sceptic,  but  all  his 
opinions  are  unformulated.  One  can  say  no  more 
than  that  he  feels  the  unseen  behind  the  seen,  and 
is  awed  and  vaguely  comforted  in  its  presence. 

Miss  M.,  too,  bravely  battled  under  that  arch, 
and  was  happy.  Her  story  adds  immensely  to  one's 
knowledge  of  and  admiration  for  her  creator.  I  can- 
not, however,  deceive  myself  into  thinking  that  it 
will  be  understood,  or  even  read,  by  a  large  public. 
A  few  people  will  read  it  ;  but  those  who  read  it  at 
all  will  read  it  many  times.  It  is  a  book  for  poets  and 
their  kindred,  and  unUke  any  other  book  that  ever 
was  written.  The  symbol  may  be  queer.  But  are  we 
not  all  Midgets,  making  terms  with  a  foreign  world, 
and  tiny  under  the  heavens  ? 


143 


CROCE  ON  SHAKESPEARE 

BENEDETTO  CROCE,  the  most  stimulating 
of  contemporary  philosophers,  has  a  uni- 
versality of  interest  rare  amongst  modern  thinkers. 
He  proceeds  with  ease  from  pure  metaphysics,  ethics, 
and  aesthetics  to  the  consideration  of  the  concrete 
results  of  history  and  the  concrete  achievements  of 
art  ;  and  the  range  of  his  knowledge  is  so  great  that 
he  can  meet  the  experts  with  equal  knowledge  in 
any  field  which  he  cares  to  enter.  The  nearest  parallel 
we  have  had  to  him  in  England  is  Coleridge  :  I  do 
not  suggest  that  his  ideas  resemble  Coleridge's,  but 
Coleridge  will  serve  as  an  indication  of  the  width 
of  his  outlook,  his  equal  gaze  over  the  eternal  and 
the  temporal,  the  humanity  of  his  philosophic  writ- 
ings, and  the  philosophic  quality  of  his  critical  work. 

Until  this  book  on  Shakespeare  appeared — trans- 
lated, rather  carelessly,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  by  his 
regular  English  interpreter,  Mr.  Ainslie — none  of 
the  great  Italian's  literary  criticisms  had  seen  the 
light  in  English.  The  volume  is  a  collection  of  essays 
on  three  great  figures — Ariosto,  Corneille,  and 
Shakespeare.  If  I  say  nothing  about  the  papers  on 
Ariosto  and  Corneille  it  is  not  only  that  I  do  not  feel 
qualified  to  discuss  writers  with  whom  I  have  a  very 
slight  acquaintance,  but  that  Croce  himself  would 
not  pretend  that  those  poets  were  on  the  same  plane 
as  Shakespeare  or  that  his  essays  on  them  were  of 
equal  importance  with  his  criticisms  of  Shakespeare. 

His  criticisms  of  Shakespeare,  I  say.  But  a  large 
part  of  his  Shakespearean  treatises  is  devoted  to 
144 


CROCE  ON  SHAKESPEARE 

criticisms  of  Shakespeare's  critics.  Signer  Croce  is 
that  unusual  thing,  a  philosopher  who  loves  poetry 
for  its  own  sake,  and  a  critic  who  realises  that  art  is 
something  other  than  a  vehicle  for  deliberate  teach- 
ing. He  is  also  a  man  of  strong  common  sense  and 
with  a  marked  proclivity  for  stating  facts  as  he  sees 
them.  The  result  is  that  the  thousand  and  one  bio- 
graphers of  and  commentators  on  Shakespeare  come 
off  very  badly  at  his  hands.  He  writes  much  valuable 
and  beautiful  criticism  ;  his  sense  of  poetic  values 
is  very  acute  ;  his  descriptions  of  such  characters 
as  Hotspur,  Falstaff,  and  Cordelia  could  scarcely  be 
bettered  for  eloquence  and  fairness.  But  he  is  largely 
controversial  ;  and  his  arguments  are  chiefly  directed 
against  those  who  will  insist  on  mixing  up  Shake- 
speare's plays  with  Shakespeare's  supposed  life  and 
opinions. 

Signor  Croce  is  penetrating  and  satisfying  as  an 
interpreter  of  Shakespeare's  characters  and  as  a 
dehneator  of  his  art.  But  in  spite  of  all  his  protests 
he  naturally  goes  farther  than  this.  He  attempts  to 
discover  the  chief  intellectual  interests  and  spiritual 
predilections  of  Shakespeare  the  poet,  and  he  also 
is  led  to  implications  about  Shakespeare  the  man. 
He  marches  under  no  political  or  religious  banner  ; 
he  is  not  the  poet  of  particular  practical  ideals,  non 
est  de  hoc  mundOy  because  he  always  goes  beyond,  to 
the  universal  man,  to  the  conscious  problem.  Signor 
Croce,  having  said  this,  feels  obliged  to  gloss  over 
the  motives  behind  the  historical  plays.  He  is  right 
in  thumping  the  commentators  who  have  attempted 
to  deduce  some  modern  brand  of  Liberalism  or 
Toryism  from  the  historical  plays.  But  he  is,  I  think, 

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understating  the  fact  when  he  says  that  all  that  the 
historical  plays  prove  is  that  Shakespeare  had  a 
keen  interest  in  "  practical  action,"  and  that  "  this 
interest,  finding  its  most  suitable  material  in  political 
and  warlike  conflicts,  was  naturally  attracted  to 
history,  and  to  that  especial  form  of  it  which  was 
nearest  to  the  soul  and  to  the  culture  of  the  poet  of 
his  people  and  of  his  time,  English  and  Roman  his- 
tory. This  material  had  already  been  brought  to  the 
theatre  by  other  writers  and  was  in  this  way  intro- 
duced to  the  attention  and  used  by  the  new  poet." 
It  might  certainly  be  put  more  bluntly.  There  is  no 
justification,  in  this  instance,  for  divorcing  the  im- 
aginations of  the  poet  from  the  affections  of  the 
man  ;  and  if  there  is  one  thing  clear  about  Shake- 
speare it  is  that  he  felt  a  peculiar  affection  for  his 
own  country  and  that  (since  he  was  far  too  intelligent 
not  to  have  put  the  question  to  himself)  he  was 
prepared  to  defend  his  patriotism  on  practical 
grounds.  There  comes  a  point  later  at  which  Signor 
Croce  uses  language  which  cannot  but  apply  to 
Shakespeare  the  man  and  arouse  curiosity  about 
Shakespeare  the  citizen.  He  refuses  to  contemplate 
the  possibility  of  knowing  Shakespeare's  intentions 
regarding  Shylock,  *'  because  Shylock  lives  and 
speaks,  himself  explaining  what  he  means,  without 
the  aid  of  commentaries,  even  such  as  the  author 
might  possibly  have  supplied  " — as  though  char- 
acters dropped  from  off  Shakespeare  as  apples  fall 
from  an  undeliberate  and  unreflecting  tree.  But  he 
is  firm  enough  about  certain  other  of  the  plays.  He 
says  of  "  King  Lear  "  :  "An  infinite  hatred  for 
deceitful  wickedness  has  inspired  this  work  "  ;   but 

146 


CROCE  ON  SHAKESPEARE 

also  the  inspiration  of  love,  love  of  goodness  mani- 
fested in  Cordelia,  "  a  true  and  complete  goodness, 
not  simply  softness,  mildness  and  indulgence  : 

Why  ?  Why  does  not  goodness  triumph  in  the 
material  world  ?  And  why,  thus  conquered,  does 
she  increase  in  beauty,  evoke  ever  more  discon- 
solate desire,  until  she  is  finally  adored  as  some- 
thing sacred  ?  The  tragedy  of  King  Lear  is  pene- 
trated throughout  with  this  unexpressed  yet 
anguished  interrogation,  so  full  of  the  sense  of  the 
misery  of  life. 

The  statement  is  unexceptionable.  One  cannot 
question  either  the  description  of  the  central  point 
of  Othello  as  being  "  the  work  of  lago,  of  that  demi- 
devil,  of  whom  one  might  ask  in  vain  why  he  had 
thus  noosed  the  bodies  and  souls  of  those  men,  who 
had  never  nourished  any  suspicion  of  him  ?  "  It  is 
true  :  he  was  contemplating  "  that  most  mysterious 
form  of  evil  .  .  .  perversity,  which  is  an  end  and  a 
joy  to  itself."  It  is  equally  true  that 

It  would  be  vain  to  seek  among  the  songs  of 
Shakespeare  for  the  song  of  reconciliation  of 
quarrels,  composed  of  inner  peace,  of  tranquillity 
achieved,  but  the  song  of  justice  echoes  every- 
where in  his  works. 

But  if  it  be  true  that  Shakespeare  the  dramatist 
meditated  much  on  evil  and  good,  that  he  had  a 
passion  for  justice,  a  hatred  of  cruelty  and  unkind- 
ness  and  malice,  a  love  of  goodness  and  charity,  is 


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it  possible  to  argue  that  this  gives  us  no  clue  to  the 
nature  of  Shakespeare  the  man  ? 

We  none  of  us,  alas,  live  up  to  the  best  of  our 
dreams.  We  may  be  models  of  good  will  towards 
mankind  when  sitting  in  our  studies,  removed  from 
the  world  of  conflicts  and  ambitions  and  temper- 
amental incompatibilities,  but  we  are  all  apt  to 
stumble  when  we  come  down  into  the  road.  Never- 
theless (and  Croce  would  be  the  first  to  admit  that 
Shakespeare  was  not  a  superman)  it  is  not  in  nature 
for  the  personality  of  a  good  artist  to  be  other  than 
the  personality  which  governs  his  deeds  in  the  prac- 
tical world.  Shakespeare  of  Stratford  (or,  if  you  like. 
Lord  Rutland,  Lord  Derby,  Lord  Oxford,  or  what- 
ever other  peer  you  fancy)  may  not  always  have  been 
just,  pure  and  kind  ;  but  it  is  inconceivable  that  he 
cannot  have  constantly  wished  to  be,  or  that  his  mind 
can  have  been  otherwise  than  continually  exercised 
with  the  problems  of  his  own  conduct.  Signor  Croce 
may  be  sympathised  with  in  his  reaction  against  the 
pedants  who  manufacture  colossal  supposititious  lives 
of  Shakespeare,  with  about  ten  small  facts  in  them, 
and  those  other  crass  pedants  who  will  be  tracing 
in  every  incident  of  his  plays  the  exact  reflection  of 
some  event  in  his  own  Ufe  or  some  episode  in  the 
history  which  was  being  made  around  him.  But  he 
himself,  however  reluctantly,  does  form  a  picture 
of  Shakespeare's  character,  of  the  character  of  a  man 
who  had  to  face,  fight  or  make  terms  with  the 
things  which  we  all  of  us  have  to  encounter.  And 
why,  since  the  character  is  a  great,  noble,  and  fas- 
cinating one,  should  we  be  precluded  from  taking 
an  interest  in  it  } 

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We  are  allowed  to  take  an  interest  in  the  worldly 
fortunes  of  Henry  V,  who  never  existed,  in  the 
spiritual  struggles  of  Macbeth  and  Hamlet,  who 
never  existed,  in  the  happy  and  unhappy  loves  of 
Desdemona,  Rosalind,  and  Romeo,  who  never  ex- 
isted ;  why  should  it  be  mean  and  gross  in  us  to 
feel  a  curiosity  about  the  emotions  and  experiences 
of  Shakespeare,  who  did  exist  and  who,  the  father  of 
them  all,  united  the  capacities  and  the  sensibilities 
of  all  of  them  ?  I  do  not  go  so  far  as  the  late  Arthur 
Bullen,  who  (and  he  was  one  of  those  rare  scholars 
whose  love  of  poetry  and  taste  in  it  could  not  be 
disputed)  stated,  when  still  young,  that  any  serious 
student  would  be  willing  to  give  an  arm  and  a  leg 
in  exchange  for  a  single  new  fact  about  Shakespeare. 
If  that  be  the  qualification  for  serious  studentship, 
I  must  frankly  confess  that  until  I  am  old  and  bed- 
ridden I  shall  be  a  non-starter  ;  and  so,  I  fancy, 
would  Shakespeare  have  been.  But  I  do  admit  to 
a  vast  curiosity  about  the  course  and  the  results  of 
Shakespeare's  contact  with  the  daily  world,  and  not 
all  Signor  Croce's  lofty  rebukes  will  make  me 
ashamed  of  it. 

Consequently  I  am  able  (I  take  myself  as  the 
representative  of  a  common  type)  to  view  with 
toleration  and  affection  the  gentlemen  who  spend 
years  grubbing  in  the  Record  Office  and  in  the 
obscurer  corners  of  Elizabethan  literature  for  new 
''  facts  "  about  the  man  who  wrote  the  plays  and 
the  sonnets.  No  "fact"  would  change  my  concep- 
tion of  his  character  or  modify  belief  in  the  general 
integrity  of  his  Hfe,  the  gentle  considerateness 
with  which  he  treated  people,  the  efforts  after  justice 

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that  he  made  in  his  dealings,  and  the  purity  and 
generosity  of  his  loves.  A  fact  apparently  irreconcil- 
able with  this  conception  I  should  treat  as  a  fact 
imperfectly  known  ;  a  fact  in  conformity  would 
give  me  great  pleasure  ;  a  fact  which  was  ''  a  simple 
primrose  "  I  should  be  glad  of  as  such.  And  though 
nothing  would  persuade  me  to  spend  my  short  life 
doing  this  sort  of  research  I  cannot  but  be  grateful 
to  those  who,  finding  nothing  better  to  do,  consent 
to  be  our  helots  and  hodmen,  zealously  embracing 
a  voluntary  servitude.  Even  the  merely  useful  have 
their  place  in  the  scheme  of  things.  We  may  fully 
accept  Signor  Croce's  reservations  about  most  of 
the  modern  Shakespearean  scholars  and  most  of 
the  older  ones  except  "  Herder,  Goethe,  Schlegel, 
Coleridge,  and  Manzoni."  But  if  the  work  of  literary 
history  had  been  left  entirely  to  philosophers  and 
to  men  with  a  perfect  understanding  of  the  pro- 
cesses of  poetic  creation  and  a  perfect  discrimination 
amongst  its  results ,  very  little  literary  history  would 
have  been  written. 

This  reservation  made,  one  may  certainly  com- 
mend the  book  to  everybody  who  takes  an  interest 
in  Shakespeare  or  in  the  poetic  art.  Or,  one  may 
add,  in  the  intellectual  and  moral  health  of  our  own 
time.  For  Croce,  although  he  has  his  shibboleths 
like  all  philosophers,  even  if  he  couch  them  in  less 
obscure  language  than  most,  is  at  once  a  man  in 
love  with  life  and  a  bracing  moralist.  He  summarises 
the  last  age  in  one  sentence,  roughly,  if  only  roughly, 
just.  How,  he  asks,  could  Shakespeare  be  rightly 
appreciated  in  an  age  when  ''  the  consciousness  of 
the  distinction  between  liberty  and  passion,  good 

150 


CROCE  ON  SHAKESPEARE 

and  evil,  nobility  and  vileness,  fineness  and  sensual- 
ity, between  the  lofty  and  the  base  in  man,  became 
obscured  ;  everything  was  conceived  as  differing 
in  quantity,  but  identical  in  substance,  and  was 
placed  in  a  deterministic  relation  with  the  external 
world." 


151 


THE  POETS  AND  CHILDHOOD 

THIS  book  (A  Book  of  English  Verse  on  In- 
fancy and  Childhood,  chosen  by  L.  S.  Wood), 
compiled  with  great  pains  and  furnished  with  ex- 
cellent notes,  contains  a  selection  of  English  poems 
dealing  with  childhood.  The  period  of  childhood  is 
defined  as  extending  over  the  first  twelve  years  of 
life.  The  selection  has  been  well  made.  Little,  save 
a  few  carols,  could  be  found  in  our  early  literature, 
and  not  much  of  any  kind  before  the  middle  of  the 
seventeenth  century.  The  Elizabethans  produced  a 
few  charming  lullabies,  and  Shakespeare,  as  always, 
was  searched  not  in  vain.  Biit  five-sixths  of  the  poems 
in  the  book  are  later  in  date  than  the  year  1700. 

Certain  aspects  of  childhood  have  never  dis- 
appeared from  poetry.  The  baby  in  his  mother's 
arms,  a  sight  which  it  falls  to  most  men's  lot  to  con- 
template with  an  emotion  as  deep  as  any,  is  an 
obviously  universal  theme.  And  the  ancients,  Hke 
ourselves,  felt  upon  a  child's  death  a  sorrow  of 
especial  poignanc}^,  and  saw  in  it  an  emblem  of 
many  of  the  elementary  facts  of  our  lives,  posing 
most  powerfully  the  riddle  of  existence,  and  evoking 
most  pathetically  all  the  associations  of  transience 
and  grief.  Hope  unfulfilled,  growth  cut  short,  beauty 
blasted,  innocence  cruelly  ill-treated  ;  all  these 
must  lie  in  the  death  of  a  child,  which  has  besides 
the  common  attributes  of  all  deaths — the  pain,  the 
bewilderment,  and  the  separation.  Many  of  the 
most  exquisite  poems  in  this  collection  (which 
strangely  does  not  contain  the  best  of  all,  the  Poet 
Laureate's  "  On  a  Dead  Child  ")  have  that  subject. 


THE  POETS  AND  CHILDHOOD 

One  of  the  best  is  a  poem  which  the  compiler 
strangely  attributes  to  the  seventeenth  century, 
but  which  cannot  conceivably  have  been  written  in 
the  seventeenth  century.  It  begins  : 

He  did  but  float  a  Httle  way 

Adown  the  stream  of  time  ; 
With  dreamy  eyes  watching  the  ripples  play, 

Or  Hstening  to  their  chime. 
His  slender  sail 
Scarce  felt  the  gale  ; 
He  did  but  float  a  little  way, 

And,  putting  to  the  shore. 
While  yet  it  was  early  day. 
Went  calmly  on  his  way, 

To  dwell  with  us  no  more. 

Yet  if  this  be  not  of  the  seventeenth  century,  there 
are  the  lovely  little  elegies  by  Carew,  Herrick,  Ben 
Jonson,  and  Sir  John  Beaumont.  What  is  not  con- 
spicuous in  these  poets  or  in  anyone  before  Vaughan, 
is  an  avowed  resort  to  early  memories  for  subjects, 
and  the  mood  in  which  modern  poetry  about  child- 
ren has  mainly  been  written. 

The  change  is  well  known,  and,  in  any  event, 
obvious.  A  tinge  of  the  modern  comes  into  Shake- 
speare's passage  : 

We  were 
Two  lads  that  thought  there  was  no  more  behind, 
But  such  a  day  to-morrow  as  to-day, 
And  to  be  boy  eternal  .  .  .  what  we  chang'd 
Was  innocence  for  innocence  ;    we  knew  not 
The  doctrine  of  ill-doing,  nor  dream 'd 
That  any  did. 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

This  might  well  be  Wordsworth,  but  it  is  unusual 
even  for  Shakespeare,  in  Shakespeare's  age.  A  man's 
own  childhood  and  childhood  in  general  were  sub- 
jects ignored. 

What  has  produced  the  change  of  outlook,  or  at 
least  of  literary  practice,  is  not  easy  to  say.  I  have 
heard  it  urged  that  there  is  a  connection  between 
the  modern  hankering  after  childhood  and  the 
modern  decay  of  religious  belief  ;  that  we  must 
have  an  earthly  Paradise  behind  us  because  we  are 
uncertain  of  a  Heavenly  Paradise  ahead  of  us  ;  but 
it  is  in  the  religious  poets  that  the  new  interest  and 
the  new  note  may  jfirst  be  observed,  and  in  them 
for  the  last  two  hundred  years  the  tendency  to  dwell 
upon  childhood,  and  with  reverence,  has  almost 
always  been  present.  It  is  common  to  almost  all 
modern  imaginative  writers,  and  especially  to  poets. 
Since  Vaughan  and  Traherne,  Blake  and  Words- 
worth, we  must  have  learned  to  receive  as  a  prin- 
cipal subject  for  poetry  childhood  considered  par- 
ticularly as  a  miraculous  thing  we  have  lost,  and  as 
a  condition  in  a  way  spiritually  superior.  The  com- 
piler of  this  anthology  seems  to  have  been  somewhat 
governed  by  this  conception,  and  one  feels  that  her 
choice  has  been  rather  restricted  by  a  felt  obligation 
to  preserve  the  tone  of  awe. 

Mr.  Belloc's  lines  urging  a  child  not  to  tear  a  book 
come  not  only  as  a  relief,  but  as  a  reminder.  We 
grown-up  persons  are  only  doing  justice  to  our- 
selves in  realising  that  not  all  children  are  im- 
peccable in  their  conduct  all  the  time.  Vice  is  not 
purely  the  product  of  age,  not  do  defects  of  char- 
acter never  come  to  light  before  the  twelfth  year. 

154 


THE  POETS  AND  CHILDHOOD 

Let  us  recall  our  own  childhood.  Looked  at  from 
the  outside — there  is  nothing  more  affecting  than 
an  early  photograph  of  oneself — it  may  arouse  feel- 
ings of  envy  and  compassion.  We  see  ourselves, 
under  the  spell  of  literature  and  in  the  light  of  the 
most  vivid  and  dearest  of  our  recollections,  wander- 
ing in  a  timeless  garden  engaged  in  the  most  harm- 
less of  occupations,  creatures  of  fairyland  who  barely 
consented  to  eat  and  drink  and  were  as  yet  ignorant 
of  the  gross  commerce  of  the  world.  We  have  a  vision 
of  childhood  in  the  abstract,  and  that  colours  our 
pictures  of  ourselves.  The  child  is  fresh  from 
Nature's  mysterious  mint,  nearer,  as  it  seems  to 
our  minds  (which  are  enslaved  by  Time),  to  the 
unknown  which  precedes  birth.  Dependent  on 
others,  he  has  no  need  to  engage  in  the  coarse 
struggles  by  which  we  earn  our  bread,  he  has  lost 
no  illusions  and  become  aware  of  no  inescapable 
bad  habits  ;  many  temptations  have  never  yet  come 
his  way  ;  and  some  of  the  more  dangerous  passions 
have  not  yet  developed  in  him.  It  is  no  wonder  that 
we  use  childhood  in  general  as  the  image  of  a  lost 
Eden,  and  that  each  individual  of  us  has  a  tendency 
to  place  his  own  Golden  Age  in  the  past.  We  have 
lost  things  we  shall  never  find  again,  and  found 
things  which  we  shall  never  be  able  to  lose.  All  our 
virtues  we  impute  to  our  childhood  and  all  our  vices 
to  our  maturer  days  ;  we  scarcely  remember — or, 
if  we  do,  we  regard  them  as  things  for  which  nobody 
was  responsible — the  misdemeanours  of  our  early 
youth  ;  and  every  word  and  deed  which  we  really 
regret  stands  as  a  tarnish  upon  our  manhood.  But 
we   ought   not  to   deceive   ourselves.   If  our  early 

155 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

memories  are  honestly  searched  we  shall  find  in 
them  elements  which  hardly  consort  with  the  notion 
of  juvenile  perfection.  We  were  ignorant  of  many 
things,  and  ignorance  was  mainly  bliss.  But  the 
emotional  and  intellectual  weaknesses  with  which 
we  are  now  painfully  familiar  were  there  as  far  back 
as  we  go,  to  the  frontiers  of  babyhood,  a  region 
from  which  we  all  emigrate  with  every  recollection 
of  it  blotted  out.  ''  'Tis  little  joy,"  said  Hood,  *'  To 
know  I'm  farther  off  from  heaven  than  when  I  was 
a  boy."  But  on  the  lower  shelves  of  memory's  cata- 
combs rest  Falsehoods  and  Fears  and  selfish  Re- 
sentments, and  Unhealthy  Curiosities  and  Idle 
Evasions,  in  form  and  feature  much  like  their  later 
descendants.  To  begin  to  think  is  to  begin  to  plot 
and  to  deceive,  to  begin  to  feel  is  to  begin  to  hate  as 
well  as  to  love  ;  dishonesty  comes  with  the  first 
games  and  shirking  with  the  first  duties.  Children 
do  not  commonly  get  drunk  or  wage  war  or  establish 
fraudulent  bucket-shops.  But  you  do  not  need  to 
be  twelve  years  old  to  lose  control  of  yourself  or  to 
persecute  or  to  cheat.  This,  that,  and  the  other  fault 
— like  the  innocuous  snobbery  in  the  *'  Young 
Visiters  " — may  be  a  merely  superficial  attribute 
shed  upon  one  by  one's  surroundings.  But  the 
demands  and  the  devices  of  the  insistent  ego  are 
there  from  the  start.  Knowledge  may  offer  them 
useful  instruments,  education  and  experience  may 
curb  their  violence.  Children  no  less  than  men  are 
in  their  manner  "  fit  for  stratagems  and  spoils," 
and  degeneracy  as  the  years  pass  is  not  the  inevitable 
and  invariable  process.  The  "  Darling  of  a  pigmy 
size  "  in  this  anthology  seldom  does  an3l:hing  more 

156 


THE  POETS  AND  CHILDHOOD 

forcible  than  halloo  to  get  an  echo  ;  if  we  cannot 
recall  our  own  youth  we  may  at  least  observe  the 
children  around  us  to  see  that  the  shades  of  the 
prison-house  close  around  at  a  very  early  date.  We 
all  know  people  who  have  considerably  improved 
since  they  were  children  ;  who  are  less  cruel,  less 
wilful,  more  honest,  more  amiable,  and  so  forth. 

Yet  it  is  not  simply  a  false  sentimentality  that 
has  made  those  who  have  written  of  their  childhood 
and  of  the  childhood  of  others  present  an  idealised 
picture.  The  poets  have  not  been  merely  deceived 
by  the  fresh  bloom  of  a  cheek  into  deducing  a  char- 
acter more  angelic  than  exists  ;  and  they  are  not 
only  influenced  by  envy  of  a  state,  in  which  one  is 
protected  against  a  harsh  world,  in  which  every 
want  is  supplied  and  every  sorrow  soothed.  We  have 
lost  something ;  it  is  not  so  much  innocence  of  mind 
or  heart  as  freshness  of  imagination.  Nothing  is  ever 
so  beautiful  as  the  things  which  were  beautiful  when 
we  were  small.  We  had  newly  come  upon  the  world. 
Every  object  interested  us  and  left  a  deep  impression 
upon  our  minds.  Every  day  new  objects  now  grown 
common  to  us  dawned  upon  our  consciousness  ; 
the  edge  of  our  enjoyment  of  the  visible  had  not 
been  dulled  by  usage,  and  there  was  no  whispering 
crowd  of  solicitudes  to  interrupt  the  bright  con- 
tinuity of  our  day  dreams.  The  bluest  skies  and  the 
most  silvery  stars  we  know  were  seen  by  us  not  this 
year,  but  many  years  ago  ;  brooks  and  shrubs  and 
insects,  we  saw  them  all  magnified  and  in  isolation  ; 
every  sense  was  its  language.  That  keenness  of 
observation,  that  freedom  of  imaginative  adventure, 
as  well  as  that  leisure,  a  grown  meditative  man  must 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

envy,  and  no  man  more  than  a  poet.  The  com- 
plementary truth  is  that  most  poets  deUberately 
draw  very  largely  upon  their  memories  of  childhood 
for  the  material  of  their  verse.  Earth,  at  any  rate, 
lies  about  us  in  our  infancy  ;  in  our  later  years  it  is 
only  very  seldom  that  we  really  look  to  see  if  it  is 
still  there.  The  brain  is  preoccupied,  and  horn  has 
come  over  the  eyes.  Eagerness  has  gone  out  of  us, 
and  when  we  look  at  a  child  the  thought,  clearly  or 
dimly,  is  present  in  our  minds  :  "  You  do  not  know 
what  you  have  or  what  is  in  store  for  you.  But  I 
was  once  what  you  are  now  and  you  will  be  what  I 
am  now."  The  matter  of  moraUty  is  not,  I  think, 
necessarily  involved. 


158 


THE  CLASSICS  IN  TRANSLATION 

HERE  are  six  more  volumes  of  the  Loeb 
Library,  which  now  contains  well  over  a 
hundred.  The  library,  one  of  the  greatest  publish- 
ing schemes  on  record,  was  made  possible  by  the 
enthusiasm,  energy,  and  riches  of  Mr.  J.  Loeb,  and 
its  success  must  have  rewarded  him.  In  time  the 
whole  of  the  surviving  works  of  Greek  and  Latin 
literature  which  are  of  the  least  interest  to  us  will 
be  available  to  us  here,  with  the  text  on  one  page 
and  a  translation  (usually  good  and  sometimes 
brilHant)  on  the  opposite  page.  The  variety  of  the 
works  pubHshed  and  the  status  of  the  translators 
may  be  gathered  by  a  glance  at  the  list.  The 
contents  of  the  new  batch  range  from  the  best 
existing  version  of  Herodotus  to  a  translation  of 
Quintilian's  treatise  on  oratory,  and  a  version  with 
a  vast  commentary  on  ApoUodorus's  collection  of 
Greek  myths  by  Sir  James  Frazer — a  work  which 
might  be  regarded  as  a  supplement  to  the  "  Golden 
Bough  "  series. 

The  Classics  can  never  regain  their  old  supremacy 
in  our  education  and,  consequently,  will  never  again 
be  so  familiar  an  element  in  social  intercourse  as 
they  were.  We  even  find  it  hard  to  realise  how  great 
their  influence  once  was.  When  the  Grammar  Schools 
were  founded,  "  grammar  "  meant  Latin  grammar  ; 
and  the  circumstances  of  the  time  justified  the  in- 
sistence laid  upon  the  ancient  tongues.  The  Renais- 
sance Modernists  could  not  wish  to  throw  Latin 
and  Greek  over  as  relics  of  MediaevaHsm,  for  Greek 

159 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

was  largely  their  own  discovery,  and  through  the 
medium  of  the  old  manuscripts  and  the  old  monu- 
ments worlds  of  new  beauty  and  new  knowledge 
had  broken  upon  them,  with  an  appeal  to  the  im- 
agination which  we  can  hardly  conceive.  Exaggera- 
tion naturally  followed  ;  a  schoolboy  learned  nothing 
of  English,  nothing  of  history,  nothing  of  con- 
temporary languages,  and  it  was  difficult  to  pursue 
in  later  life  the  study  of  any  science  without  an  in- 
timate acquaintance  with  Latin.  In  the  nineteenth 
century  we  suddenly  awoke  to  the  fact  that  we  were 
still  living  under  the  hardened  crust  of  what  had 
once  been  a  living  movement.  We  began  shoulder- 
ing through  it,  and  we  have  now  largely  broken  it  up. 
It  is  impossible  that  the  Classics  should  recover 
their  former  place  in  education,  and,  indeed,  certain 
that  they  will  lose  more  ground  than  they  yet  have 
— ground  which  will,  let  us  hope,  be  partly  occupied 
by  other  human  studies,  and  not  entirely  given  over 
to  laboratory  "  experiments."  But  there  is  some- 
thing more  than  a  just  and  natural  reaction  against 
them  to  be  observed.  We  may  see  all  around  us  a 
kind  of  passionate  animus  against  them,  a  desire  to 
oust  them  completely,  even  to  obliterate  them  from 
the  consciousness  of  the  race.  In  some  quarters  you 
cannot  mention  Latin  without  inviting  the  answer 
*'  dead  language,"  or  Greek  without  being  deemed 
one  of  those  supposedly  blind  and  besotted  obscur- 
antists, the  supporters  of  compulsory  Greek.  I  know 
some  otherwise  enlightened  men  whom  I  suspect  of 
a  secret  desire  to  introduce  Total  Prohibition  of 
the  teaching  of  Latin  or  Greek,  with  a  heavy  punish- 
ment for  illicit  distillers  and  secret  consumers.  The 

1 60 


THE  CLASSICS  IN  TRANSLATION 

prejudice  extends  to  the  Greeks  and  Romans  them- 
selves :  many  people  felt  in  Mr.  Wells's  "  OutUne 
of  History  "  an  inclination  to  "  larn  "  the  Greeks 
and  Romans  to  be  classics,  to  visit  on  them  all  the 
sins  of  all  the  Dons.  In  the  heat  of  our  enthusiasm 
for  a  Business  Administration  Mr.  Asquith's  defects 
were  ascribed  to  the  fact  that  he  took  the  Craven, 
and  the  merits  of  Sir  Barnaby  Rudge,  the  eminent 
entrepreneur,  to  the  fact  that  he  didn't.  In  some 
quarters  a  knowledge  of  the  Classics  is  regarded  as 
a  handicap,  almost  as  a  disgrace,  something  that 
emasculates  or  petrifies  a  man  ;  and  deliberately 
anti-democratic  at  that. 

For  this  absurdity  there  are  several  reasons.  In 
the  first  place  all  reactions  go  too  far  :  those  who 
find  consolation  in  metaphors  may  comfort  them- 
selves with  the  reflection  that  the  pendulum  which 
sagely  stopped  in  the  middle  would  not  work  the 
clock.  In  the  second  place  there  is  a  certain  amount 
of  envy.  The  tendency  to  think  (or  to  pretend,  for 
one's  own  comfort)  that  what  one  doesn't  know 
isn't  worth  knowing  is  not  confined  to  a  few  especially 
vain  persons.  It  is,  in  varying  degrees,  one  of  the 
commonest  foibles  of  the  human  race  ;  and  those 
who  do  not  know  the  Classics  are  much  more  vocal 
now  than  they  were  fifty  years  ago.  Moreover,  the 
last  strongholds  of  overdone  classical  teaching  have 
been  the  institutions  of  the  rich  ;  Latin  and  Greek 
have  acquired  a  strong  class  flavour  which  tends  to 
exaggerate  the  jealousy  felt  against  them.  In  the 
third  place  their  defenders,  as  a  body,  have  fre- 
quently ''asked  for  it."  While  one  don  is  busily 
translating  Plato  or  Sophocles,  ten  others  are  telling 

i6i  M 


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people  that  they  cannot  get  the  slightest  inkling  of 
Plato  and  Sophocles  unless  they  read  them  in  the 
original.  The  classical  schoolmaster,  looking  dis- 
dainfully down  from  his  antique  keep  (which  once 
was  as  new  as  South  Kensington),  has  often  dis- 
played a  maddening  contempt  for  every  form  of 
study  not  his  own,  and  a  deplorable  lack  of  curiosity 
about  the  spiritual  and  physical  world  into  which 
he  has  been  born.  Nothing  else  but  Greek  and  Latin 
could  exercise  the  intellectual  faculties  of  youth. 
Men  who  apparently  lacked  the  least  tinge  of  wis- 
dom talked  of  the  classics  as  the  only  sources  of 
wisdom,  and  men  patently  devoid  of  aesthetic  sensi- 
bihty  argued,  or  rather  stated,  that  no  modern 
literature  could  hope  to  compete  with  the  ancient — 
however  long,  apparently,  it  might  continue  to  grow. 
Naturally  a  great  many  spirited  people,  listening 
to  this  sort  of  talk,  feel  a  strong  desire  to  cram  their 
Hesiods  down  their  throats.  I  have  said  ''  feel,"  I 
ought  to  have  said  "  felt."  For  during  recent  years 
the  classical  don  and  the  classical  schoolmaster 
have  become  very  subdued.  Many  of  them  have 
the  air  of  unwanted  orphans  in  a  cold  world,  or 
decrepit  wasps  who  are  afraid  of  being  smoked  out 
of  their  nests.  Youth  is  dashing  away  to  engineering  ; 
parents  are  making  themselves  felt  ;  they  have  no 
influence  over  the  new  race  of  politicians  and  pub- 
licists. The  best  of  them  are  seriously  concerned  lest 
the  value  they  know  to  lie  in  a  classical  education 
should  be  lost  to  the  State,  and  those  who  most  love 
the  ancient  Hteratures  fear  that  in  process  of  time 
Latin  and  Greek  might  really  become  dead  languages. 
Let  us  hope  not,  though  we  are  still  not  in  a 

162 


THE  CLASSICS  IN  TRANSLATION 

position  to  guess  what  proportion,  even  of  the  most 
studious  boys,  would  choose  Greek  and  Latin  for 
subjects  of  study  were  heavy  premiums  not  put 
upon  those  subjects.  In  another  generation  there 
will  certainly  be  fewer  people  who  can  quote  Horace 
than  now,  even  in  the  House  of  Lords,  the  only 
place  where  it  is  still  done  (about  once  in  six  months) 
without  producing  a  smile  or  a  scoff.  The  proportion 
of  scholarships  given  to  the  classics  ^^■ill  certainly 
diminish,  and  they  will  probably  have  vanished  as 
compulsory  subjects  from  the  most  conservative  of 
our  schools.  Yet  I  cannot  but  think  that  as  soon  as 
their  privileges  have  been  removed  they  will  call 
with  a  new  fascination  to  many  young  men  ;  that 
persons,  even,  w^ho  have  had  no  proper  groundwork 
at  school,  will,  at  the  period  of  intellectual  awaken- 
ing, take  to  the  Classics  with  something  of  the  zest 
and  energy  with  which  young  men  now  take  to  other 
fresh  studies.  From  the  general  point  of  view — 
once  the  admission  has  been  made  that  the  Classics 
can  be  replaced  as  necessary  elements  in  the  training 
of  a  fully  educated  man — there  will  be  no  need  of  a 
very  large  body  of  competent  classical  scholars. 
The  bulk  of  the  textual  work  on  the  existing  Classics 
has  been  done  ;  no  great  percentage  of  European 
classical  scholars  is  directly  engaged  in  digesting 
and  elucidating  the  fruits,  manuscript  and  other,  of 
current  archaeological  research  ;  and  even  produc- 
tive digging  will  come  to  an  end  in  time. 

So  far  as  our  civilisation  is  concerned  the  essential 
thing  is  that  access  to  the  thought  and  records  of 
the  Greeks  and  Latins  should  be  easy.  And  com- 
mon sense   insists   that   this   access   may  be   open 

163 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

through  translations — which,  by  the  way,  must,  as 
a  rule,  be  renewed  from  age  to  age.  Classical  poetry 
in  translation — save  in  rare  fragments  done  by  great 
poets  and  not  by  great  scholars — naturally  loses  as 
much  as  English  poetry  would  lose  if  translated  into 
Latin.  Prose  style  may  often  be  incommunicable  in 
translation.  Yet  what  proportion  even  of  reputable 
scholars  have  read  the  Classics  primarily  as  an 
aesthetic  experience  ?  And  how  tiny  a  fraction  of 
those  who  have,  in  any  age,  gone  through  the  classical 
mill  have  gone  through  life  with  their  Homers  or 
their  Virgils  in  their  coat  pockets  !  It  was  not  Homer's 
"  Iliad,"  but  Pope's,  that  sold  twenty  thousand 
copies  in  the  time  of  Queen  Anne,  who  is  dead. 
Even  here  it  cannot  be  granted  that  all  is  lost  if 
there  be  no  first-hand  reading  :  Shakespeare  prob- 
ably and  Keats  certainly  are  evidence  to  the  con- 
trary. But  in  a  more  general  way  it  may  be  argued 
most  forcibly  that  one  who  should  know  the  corpus 
of  the  Classics,  poetical,  historical,  philosophical, 
through  translations  might  have  a  far  profounder 
appreciation  of  the  mind,  morals,  and  arts  of  Athens 
and  Rome  than  many  of  the  finest  scholars  on  record. 
I  once  heard  a  classical  don  maintain  with  heat  that 
you  could  not  discuss  the  ancient  literatures  if  you 
knew  them  only  in  translations  ("no  word  was  ever 
an  exact  rendering  of  another  word,"  etc.),  and  a 
moment  after  proceed  to  dogmatise  about  Tolstoi 
and  Turgenev  for  all  he  was  worth.  Yet  he  did  not 
know  a  word  of  Russian.  Who,  except  Mrs.  Garnett, 
Mr.  Baring,  Mr.  Harold  Williams,  and  a  few  others, 
does  ? 

If  (which  Heaven  prevent)  all  the  classical  texts 

164 


THE  CLASSICS  IN  TRANSLATION 

were  to  disappear,  and  only  the  English  pages  of 
the  Loeb  Ubrary  were  to  survive,  we  should  go  on 
discussing  the  qualities  and  achievements  of  the 
ancients,  and  (excepting  that  those  who  really  know 
would  not  in  each  generation  exercise  their  authority 
to  keep  up  a  reverence  for  the  supreme  expression 
of  certain  of  the  poets)  we  should  not  be  greatly 
handicapped  in  making  our  estimates,  in  drawing 
suggestions  from  ancient  thought,  or  warnings  from 
ancient  experience.  Even  to-day  our  classics  may 
read  Aristotle  in  the  original,  but  our  political 
scientists  usually  do  not.  If  it  be  true  that  Plutarch 
was  partly  responsible  for  the  French  revolution, 
he  would  have  been  (probably  was)  just  as  efficacious 
in  translation  as  in  the  original.  So  if  we  cannot 
restore  the  widespread  study  of  the  originals  we 
may  at  least  try  to  promote  a  knowledge  of  trans- 
lations more  general  than  ever  before.  They  are 
even,  as  a  rule  (it  may  be  worth  suggesting),  good 
reading.  There  are  dull  classical  as  there  are  dull 
modern  books  ;  but  it  is  a  remarkably  low  pro- 
portion of  those  which  have  survived.  I  open  the 
second  volume  of  Mr.  A.  D.  Godley's  exquisite 
version  of  Herodotus  at  random,  and  this  is  what  I 
see  :  "  The  Budini  are  native  to  the  soil ;  they  are 
nomads,  and  the  only  people  in  these  parts  that  eat 
fir-cones."  I  think  I  shall  go  on  from  there. 


i6s 


ESCAPES 

EVEN  a  convict  escaped  from  Dartmoor  com- 
mands almost  universal  sympathy.  Provided, 
in  his  efforts  to  get  to  safety,  he  merely  steals 
clothes  and  food  and  does  not  commit  murderous 
assaults,  the  secret  good  wishes  of  the  most  respect- 
able people  are  with  him.  He  may  be  a  professional 
blackguard,  brutal,  unscrupulous,  and  evil  of  coun- 
tenance, but  it  doesn't  matter.  He  has  shown 
courage  and  cleverness  ;  he  has  pitted  himself 
against  society,  this  time  in  an  enterprise  which  is 
in  itself  innocent  ;  he  is  a  small  thing  hunted  by  a 
big  thing  ;  and  we  all  hope  he  will  get  away — pro- 
vided alw^ays,  be  it  understood,  that  there  is  no 
likelihood  of  his  appearing  through  our  own 
window  at  dead  of  night.  The  qualities  of  gameness 
and  adventurousness,  the  Thermopylae  element  in 
the  unequal  contest,  appeal  to  human  nature  so 
strongly  that  for  a  generation  the  unspeakable  villain 
Charles  (affectionately  Charlie,  like  Mr.  Chaplin) 
Peace  was  almost  a  popular  hero,  whilst  reprobation 
was  reserved  for  the  woman  who  was  supposed  to 
have  "  done  him  in."  Nobody,  whatever  pubHc 
approval  may  be  expressed,  really  likes  the  person 
who  gives  information  about  an  escaped  criminal. 
Here,  as  so  often,  the  conscientious  man  has  to 
deplore  a  conflict  between  his  civic  sense  and  his 
natural  instincts. 

Every  escape  is  interesting,  and  every  escaped 
prisoner  arouses  our  sympathy.  The  best  of  the 
stories  of  escape  from  Germany  will  be  as  thrilling 

1 66 


ESCAPES 

as  ever  twenty  years  hence,  when  most  of  the  his- 
tories of  operations  and  other  impersonal  war  books 
have  become  documents  for  students  or  less  than 
that.  The  advantage  is  not  peculiar  to  books  about 
escapes.  All  biographical  books,  all  stories  of  the 
personal  adventures  of  a  man  or  a  small  group  have 
a  power  of  holding  the  attention  which  is  often  lack- 
ing in  works  conventionally  of  great  "  importance." 
For  one  man  who  will  read  a  naval  history  a  hundred 
will  read  the  life  of  Nelson.  If  Napoleon's  battles 
are  widely  studied  by  unprofessional  readers  it  is 
largely  because  they  were  fought  by  Napoleon.  The 
fate  of  Europe  hung  on  Marlborough's  battles  also, 
but  it  has  always  been  impossible  to  persuade  people 
to  take  an  interest  in  them,  because  they  neither 
know  anything  nor  want  to  know  anything  about 
Marlborough.  History  is  history  to  very  few  ;  to 
most  it  is  drama.  If  we  are  to  examine  great  events 
we  prefer  to  do  it  through  the  eyes  of  one  man,  and 
it  is  conceivable  that  posterity  will  know  no  more 
about  the  East  African  campaign  than  it  can  learn 
from  Major  Brett- Young's  "  Marching  on  Tanga,'* 
which  happens  to  be  a  very  personal  book  written 
in  beautiful  prose. 

Of  the  good  war-books  of  this  kind  perhaps  the 
majority  have  been  narratives  of  escape,  and  there 
will  probably  be  more  of  them  within  the  next  few 
years.  Those  published  during  the  war  were  written 
under  a  serious  handicap.  Nothing  could  be  in- 
cluded which  might  assist  the  enemy,  and  no  in- 
formation about  methods  of  escape  which  might 
impair  the  chances  of  anybody  else  escaping.  There 
were   nevertheless   several    which,    if  slight,   were 

167 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

extremely  exciting  ;  amongst  them  Capt.  Gilliland's 
*'  My  German  Prisons,"  Captain  Gaunter 's  modest 
and  vivid  *'  Thirteen  Days,"  and,  above  all,  the  late 
Pat  O'Brien's  characteristically  named  *'  Outwitting 
the  Hun."  This  author  was  a  young  American  in 
the  British  Air  Force  ;  he  was  reported  recently  to 
have  been  killed  in  an  accident  in  a  Western  State. 
He  wrote  his  book  slangily  and  with  the  gusto  of 
one  who,  if  he  had  no  true  tall  stories  to  tell,  would 
have  invented  false  ones  for  the  fun  of  telling  them. 
Nothing  that  happened  to  him  was  of  an  ordinary 
kind.  He  began  by  nose-diving  from  a  height  of 
several  thousand  feet  and  crashing  without  break- 
ing a  bone.  He  leapt  off  a  train  almost  as  soon  as  he 
got  into  Germany.  After  living  on  roots  for  days  he 
swam  the  Meuse  in  so  exhausted  a  condition  that 
he  had  to  get  rid  of  his  wrist  watch  in  order  to  re- 
lieve himself  of  its  weight.  He  lived  in  a  large  Belgian 
town  for  weeks  with  Germans  all  around  ;  he  got 
into  Holland  by  burrowing  under  the  great  German 
wire-fence  ;  and  he  rounded  off  his  exploits  by 
dedicating  his  book  to  the  useful  Pole  Star,  which 
had  probably  never  received  such  an  honour  before. 
The  book  is  one  which  may  still  be  commended 
as  a  true  story  as  full  of  dramatic  moments  as 
"  Greenmantle  "  ;  but  the  best  and  most  elaborate 
escape  stories  have  taken  longer  to  write  and  ap- 
peared later.  ''  The  Road  to  Endor  "  is  now, 
deservedly,  in  its  seventh  edition,  and  it  is  highly 
probable  that  Captain  Evans's  book,  The  Escaping 
Club,  will  have  an  equal  success. 

Captain  Evans  is  the  Hampshire  and   England 
cricketer.  During  the  Somme  battle  an  intractable 

1 68 


ESCAPES 

aeroplane  engine  let  him  down  in  the  German  lines, 
and  he  spent  most  of  the  rest  of  the  war-period 
escaping  from  captivity.  He  had  been  in  Germany 
(the  Harz  district)  for  two  months  when  he  got  well 
away  for  the  first  time,  went  by  train  to  Dusseldorf 
with  a  Belgian  confederate,  spent  a  day  there,  and 
was  ultimately  caught  twenty  yards  from  the  Dutch 
frontier.  The  result  of  this  was  removal  to  the  dark, 
icy,  insanitary,  crowded  Fort  9  at  Ingolstadt,  where 
were  collected  a  large  number  of  the  toughest  char- 
acters from  the  Allied  armies.  Most  of  them  were 
there  as  punishment  for  escaping  from  other  camps. 
They  answered  gross  ill-treatment  with  perpetual 
insubordination,  and  they  spent  most  of  their  time 
inventing  and  attempting  every  sort  of  ingenious 
scheme  for  getting  out  of  an  almost  impossible 
place.  In  this  camp  there  were  : 

Men  who  could  make  keys  which  would  unlock 
any  door  ;  men  who  could  temper  and  jag  the 
edge  of  an  old  table-knife  so  that  it  would  cut 
iron  bars  ;  expert  photographers  (very  useful  for 
copying  maps)  ;  engineering  experts  who  would 
be  called  in  to  give  advice  on  any  tunnel  which 
was  being  dug  ;  men  who  spoke  German  per- 
fectly ;  men  who  shammed  insanity  perfectly, 
and  many,  like  myself,  v.ho  were  ready  to  risk  a 
bit  to  get  out,  but  had  no  parlour-tricks.  One  had 
escaped  from  his  prison-camp  dressed  as  a  Ger- 
man officer  ;  another  had  escaped  in  a  dirty 
clothes  basket,  and  another  had  been  wheeled 
out  of  the  camp  hidden  in  a  muck-tub  ;  another 
sportsman  had  painted  his  face  green  to  look  Uke 

169 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

a  water-lily,  and  had  swum  the  moat  in  daylight 
under  the  sentry's  nose.  .  .  .  Forgery,  bribery, 
impersonation,  with  an  utter  disregard  of  risks 
of  being  shot,  all  found  their  advocates  in  Fort  9. 

Thenceforth,  in  the  book,  attempts  to  escape  are 
almost  continuous.  Captain  Evans's  own  first  effort 
(with  two  companions)  was  a  dash  over  the  frozen 
moat,  followed  by  ''  a  fair  amount  of  shooting  "  ; 
a  lorry-load  of  munition  workers  put  an  end  to  this. 
Six  weeks  later,  with  snow  on  the  ground,  he  and 
another  cut  their  way  at  night  through  a  wired 
window  and  got  away  with  white  overclothes  on, 
shots  again  following.  Bad  luck  once  more  ruined 
their  chances,  and  they  were  brought  back  to  "  a 
very  hostile  reception  from  a  mob  of  angry  sentries," 
the  Feldwebel  ''  cursing  them  roundly  for  bringing 
us  in  alive  rather  than  dead."  Several  other  schemes 
were  fruitless,  but  at  last  the  chance  came.  There 
were  riots.  A  party  of  prisoners  was  dispatched  by 
train  for  another  camp.  At  a  favourable  moment 
the  sentries  were  distracted  and  obstructed,  Captain 
Evans  and  Lieutenant  Buckley  sprawled  out  of  the 
window,  and  there  began  a  two-hundred  miles 
journey  to  the  Swiss  frontier.  It  took  eighteen  nights, 
and  the  description  of  it  fills  fifty  very  fine  pages. 
Captain  Evans  returned  home  ;  went  to  Palestine  ; 
was  captured  by  murderous  Arabs  and  nearly  killed  ; 
made  a  dash  for  the  coast  alone  and  foodless,  and 
failed  ;  was  taken  to  Constantinople  ;  and  got  out 
of  Turkey  just  before  the  Armistice.  It  is  impossible 
to  do  justice  to  his  book  in  a  summary  or  in  quota- 
tions. It  is  crowded  with  detail,  and  written  in  a  very 

170 


ESCAPES 

direct  style,  without  ever  a  word  put  in  for  effect  or 
a  sentence  noticeably  careless.  The  spirit  of  it  is 
equally  admirable.  Captain  Evans  has  a  respect  for 
truth  and  his  general  coolness  and  restraint  give 
peculiar  force  to  his  one  set  denunciation,  which  is 
aimed  at  the  whole  race  of  Turks. 

Captain  Evans  says  somewhere  that  he  would 
like  to  know  whether  German  prisoners  here  found 
smuggHng  as  easy  as  he  did.  It  is  permissible  to  feel 
curiosity  also  about  the  escapes  of  Germans  from 
prison-camps  in  England.  Whether  any  of  them 
actually  got  back  to  Germany  I  do  not  know,  and  I 
do  not  think  we  were  ever  told.  It  is  not  Hkely  that 
many  could  have  done  so.  It  is  one  thing,  prodi- 
giously dangerous  and  difficult  though  the  feat 
always  was,  to  crawl,  or  make  a  midnight  dash, 
between  sentries  on  a  land  frontier  ;  it  is  another 
to  get  across  the  high  seas.  There  were,  I  seem  to 
remember,  Germans  captured  in  a  small  stolen  boat, 
and  there  was  one  (who  certainly  deserved  to  get 
away)  who  smuggled  himself  on  board  ship,  or  near 
it,  disguised  as  a  consignment  of  fish  or  a  piano,  in 
a  large  wooden  crate  pierced  with  air-holes.  But  if 
none  got  out  of  the  country,  many  escaped  from 
their  prisons,  and  some  were  at  large  for  weeks  and 
were  recaptured  after  long  wanderings. 

Presumably  some  of  these  will  have  published 
their  experiences  in  Germany.  But  as  far  as  I  know, 
only  one  such  book  has  as  yet  been  translated,  and 
that  was  rather  a  thin  book  in  which  there  was  a 
short  account  of  Donington  Hall  and  a  short,  if 
interesting,  sketch  of  a  walk  from  Donington  Hall  to 
Nottingham,  where  the  local  police  force  interrupted 

171 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

the  tour.  Cannot  some  publisher  get  us  one  or 
two  others  ?  It  is  not  that  one  is  particularly  eager 
to  hear  about  the  domestic  life  of  the  Germans  in 
British  prison-camps,  which  was,  to  put  it  mildly, 
less  eventful  than  that  of  the  unfortunate  English- 
men who  fell  into  the  hands  of  Germany  ;  though 
even  here  one  would  be  interested  to  learn  how 
English  commandants  and  guards  appeared  through 
those  strange  German  spectacles.  But  the  methods 
of  escape  adopted  in  our  own  midst  excite  one's 
curiosity,  and  above  all  it  would  be  entertaining  to 
see  how  our  own  familiar  countryside  and  towns  and 
people  looked  to  the  escaping  foreigner. 

For  the  prisoner  who  is  escaping  through  a  strange 
land  observes  the  scenes  through  which  he  passes 
with  painful  closeness  and  from  a  peculiar  angle. 
The  Germany  that  Captain  Evans  and  his  com- 
rades saw  was  not  the  Germany  which  the  Germans 
saw.  The  moment  a  man  was  slinking  on  his  way  to 
the  frontier  the  whole  landscape  changed.  The  most 
ordinary  scenes  became  invested  with  a  romantic 
quality.  Lanes,  fields,  woods,  cottages,  rivers, 
bridges,  signal-boxes,  which  were  commonplace  to 
accustomed  eyes,  took  on  a  mystery,  became  grim 
and  menacing,  were  dreaded  for  the  perils  they 
might  conceal  or  blessed  for  their  harmlessness. 
Every  object  seen  was  seen  for  the  first  time  and  in 
an  unusual  aspect  ;  every  yokel  and  every  dairy- 
maid working  in  the  fields  or  walking  home  or 
chatting  under  a  street-lamp  was  a  possible  enemy  ; 
every  enforced  conversation  was  an  adventure,  and 
every  eye  was  watched  for  the  glint  of  suspicion.  It 
would  be  an  amusing  thing  to  have  a  few  pictures 

172 


ESCAPES 

of  our  own  homely  roads,  our  own  streets  and 
railway  stations,  and  our  own  routine  selves, 
done  from  the  point  of  view  of  men  who  were 
travelhng  across  England  much  as  though  it  were 
an  Africa,  full  of  lurking  deaths,  with  the  courage 
of  soHtary  wanderers  fighting  their  way  out  of  a 
region  of  enchantments.  Did  a  man,  four  years  ago, 
with  his  heart  standing  still,  ask  the  clerk  at  Bir- 
mingham booking  office,  in  consciously  bad  English, 
for  a  ticket  to  Paddington  ?  Did  a  man,  cold  and 
ragged,  he  under  leaves  in  a  copse  of  Richmond 
Park  as  Captain  Evans  lay,  evening  after  evening, 
on  the  hills  of  Bavaria  ?  Did  one  sit  on  the  Embank- 
ment watching  the  gulls,  pretending  to  read  a  paper, 
frightened  of  every  policeman,  and  wondering 
where  to  go  next  ?  Did  a  party  of  them  boil  their 
Bovril  in  the  woods  above  Oxford  ?  Did  stray 
fugitives  swim  the  Trent  and  the  Thames,  blunder 
on  the  Washington  Inn  without  knowing  its  name, 
and  see  it  as  a  sinister  thing,  inspect  Salisbury 
Cathedral,  look  hungrily  over  the  moonlit  Channel 
from  the  Downs,  bluff  their  way  through  com- 
panies amongst  whom  we  ourselves  may  have  been, 
take  the  wrong  road  at  Guildford,  and  fall  into  a 
trap  at  Stoke  Poges  ?  There  must  be  many  Ger- 
mans who  have  tales  of  desperate  adventure  in  an 
England  which  is  to  us  so  comfortable  and  unsus- 
pecting— ending  usually,  no  doubt,  in  conversations 
with  farmers  and  policemen  which,  and  whom,  they 
will  have  found  very  odd. 


173 


LORD  ROSEBERY'S  MISCELLANIES 

IN  a  prefatory  note  to  this  collection  Mr.  John 
Buchan  takes  the  responsibility  for  it  ;  he  im- 
portuned Lord  Rosebery  to  "  release  "  his  mis- 
cellaneous shorter  works  for  publication.  These  in- 
clude one  or  two  long  historical  essays  ;  a  few  review 
articles  and  prefaces  ;  and  a  large  number  of  dis- 
quisitions on  a  variety  of  subjects  delivered  from 
Scottish  Rectorial  chairs  or  before  statues  which 
Lord  Rosebery  was  unveiHng.  How  dull,  were  the 
author  anybody  but  Lord  Rosebery,  it  would  all 
sound !  But,  the  author  being  he,  it  was  a  collection 
well  worth  making. 

The  little  monograph  on  Lord  Randolph  Churchill 
is  already  well  known  ;  it  is  extraordinarily  good, 
and  makes  one  wish  that  Lord  Rosebery  would 
supplement  it  with  other  portraits  of  his  contempo- 
raries. The  study  of  Peel  is  also  familiar  ;  it  is  just 
and  illuminating,  and  it  contains  a  passage  on  the 
modern  Prime  Minister  and  the  modern  Cabinet 
more  frank  and  acute  than  anything  that  has  been 
said  on  the  subject  by  any  other  living  politician. 
Of  the  other  historical  papers  the  chief  are  the 
group  which  deal  with  Scotland.  I  hesitate  even  to 
touch  on  these  arcana  ;  when  I  began  reading  them, 
so  full  as  they  are  of  enthusiasms  and  rituals  and 
allusions  strange  to  me,  I  felt  almost  Hke  a  shy  in- 
truder who  has  strayed  into  some  service  in  a  mosque. 
But  they  are  excellent  reading,  and  contain  passages 
which  must  be  an  inspiration  to  any  Scotsman  who 
reads  them.  The  most  conspicuous  of  the  literary 

174 


LORD  ROSEBERY'S  MISCELLANIES 

essays  are  those  on  Burke  and  Dr.  Johnson.  That 
on  Johnson  was  a  centenary  address  given  at  Lich- 
field ;  the  main  elements  in  the  Doctor's  character 
and  in  Boswell's  success  have  never  been  better  or 
more  succinctly  described.  Lord  Rosebery  is  devoted 
to  these  two  authors  above  all  ;  but  his  taste,  though 
he  says  little  of  poetry  (except  Burns 's),  and  nothing 
of  any  modern  author  except  Stevenson,  is  obviously 
catholic.  He  is  hearty  in  his  admirations  and  pleas- 
antly candid  about  his  dislikes.  He  says,  refresh- 
ingly, that  he  finds  Chesterfield's  letters  dreary  ; 
he  describes  "  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  "  as  an 
"  utterly  repulsive  "  story  of  "  the  conflict  of  a 
scoundrel  against  a  maniac  narrated  by  a  coward  "  ; 
he  betrays  an  intimate  knowledge  of  Swift,  Scott, 
and  Miss  Austen  ;  and  he  wTites  a  charming  ap- 
preciation of  Thackeray  in  which  the  qualities  and 
defects  of  ''  Vanity  Fair  "  are  balanced  with  con- 
summate art. 

Everywhere  the  expression  is  normally  easy  ;  the 
periods  when  they  come  glide  naturally  out  of  the 
elegantly  conversational.  The  words,  as  everybody 
knows,  are  admirably  chosen,  and  the  incidental 
jokes,  often  very  quietly  ironical,  are  a  constant 
temptation  to  the  pencil.  Wordsworth  "  was  not 
prone  to  external  admiration  "  ;  Landor  would 
have  been  hard  put  to  it  to  write  an  Imaginary  Con- 
versation between  a  Tory  Democrat  and  Lord 
Eldon  ;  the  old  aim  in  Scotland  was  to  get  ''  two 
eyes  for  an  eye  and  two  teeth  for  a  tooth  "  ;  the 
Scotch  monarch  was  a  sort  of  "  Hving  Great  Seal." 
Contemplating  the  developments  of  a  mechanical 
age,  he  pictures  "  His  Royal  Highness  the  Prince 

175 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

of  Wales  leading  home  the  victorious  locomotive 
in  the  national  race  on  Epsom  Downs  "  ;  he  has  a 
delicious  set  passage  on  the  modern  rage  for  memo- 
rials and  testimonials  ;  and  he  frequently  dwells 
on  the  drawbacks  of  speechifying.  "  Speeches,"  he 
says,  in  one  place  : 

even  the  best,  are  as  evanescent  as  fireworks  or 
thistle-down  ;  they  are  explored  for  untimely 
quotation  during  the  speaker's  Ufe,  and  when 
that  useful  purpose  ceases  with  his  death,  they 
cease  to  be  opened  at  all  ;  they  are  even  less  read 
than  old  sermons,  which  possess  an  elect  pubUc 
of  their  own. 

These  volumes  contain  much  wit,  much  sense, 
much  sound,  and  much  eloquent  English,  much 
interesting  literary  and  historical  criticism,  many 
valuable  studies  in  portraiture.  Those  attributes 
alone  would  give  them  a  high  rank  amongst  the  pro- 
ductions of  literary  politicians.  Except  for  one  or 
two  short  speeches,  which  have  no  merit  but  a  per- 
functory polish,  every  essay  and  address  that  Lord 
Rosebery  has  compiled  has  displayed  both  wide 
reading  and  prolonged  reflection.  He,  the  most 
expert  of  ceremonial  orators,  has  never  been  con- 
tent that  his  oratory  should  be  merely  ceremonial. 
A  man  is  no  more  on  his  oath  in  a  ceremonial  address 
than  in  a  lapidary  inscription,  but  Lord  Rosebery 
has  never  been  content  to  fob  his  audiences  off  with 
pleasant  platitudes  or  easy  first  thoughts.  A  man 
with  his  gifts  could  quite  easily  have  done  it  and 
with  applause  ;  his  mere  grace  of  style  in  writing, 
his  mere  voice  and  gesture  in  speaking,  were  always 

176 


LORD  ROSEBERY'S  MISCELLANIES 

sufficient  to  carry  him  through  without  trouble  if 
he  cared  to  be  so  carried  through.  But  he  ahvays 
took  his  commissions  of  this  kind  more  seriously 
than  he  thought  it  necessary  to  admit.  The  jesting 
or  diffident  exordium  was  always  succeeded  by  the 
evidence  of  close  reading  and  a  serious  desire  to  say 
something  worth  saying.  There  is  hardly  a  paper  or 
a  speech  in  the  collection  which  is  not  worth  having 
for  the  information  which  it  contains  and  the  judg- 
ments based  upon  that  information.  Yet  for  all  this 
the  main  interest  of  these  volumes  does  not  derive 
from  the  facts  or  the  criticisms  which  they  incor- 
porate, from  their  varied  erudition  or  from  the 
admirable  construction  of  their  sentences.  It  is  not 
Lord  Rosebery's  talent  but  his  strain  of  genius 
which  chiefly  fascinates. 

The  quality  of  his  imagination  frequently  comes 
out  in  isolated  phrases  or  images,  resembling  those 
of  his  hero  Burke,  and  of  the  lesser  (but  often  Burke- 
Hke  in  this  regard)  Walter  Bagehot.  This  is  the  sort 
of  sentence  I  mean  : — *'  The  crises  of  nations,  like 
the  crises  of  Nature,  have  their  thunderbolts,  and 
Cromwell  was  one  of  these  "  ;  and  ''  I  have  seen 
life  and  death  and  glory  chasing  each  other  like 
shadows  on  a  summer  sea  "  ;  and  (to  men  leaving 
their  university)  "  There  will  always  be  a  voice 
from  these  old  walls  which  will  speak  as  a  second 
conscience  "  ;  and  (when  he  is  speaking  of  the  swift 
changes  in  the  streets  and  houses  of  London)  '*  When 
in  a  long  walk  one  comes  on  some  untouched  nook 
it  is  with  the  same  surprise  that  one  finds  a  patch  of 
snow  under  a  hedgerow  in  a  thaw."  But  his  imagin- 
ation does  not  operate  only  in  these  localised  flashes. 

177  N 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

His  imaginative,  one  may  as  well  say  poetic,  frame 
of  mind  comes  out  also  in  his  power,  and  his  con- 
stant inclination  to  exercise  the  power,  of  establish- 
ing a  sudden  sympathetic  contact  with  his  audience 
and  compelling  them  to  join  with  him  in  some 
strange  adventure  of  the  mind.  He  is  talking  on 
Burns,  and  he  must  unexpectedly,  with  a  few  words, 
make  his  audience  think  of  the  births  taking  place 
in  the  world  at  that  instant  and  the  possibility  of 
another  Newton  or  another  Cassar  being  amongst 
them.  He  is  addressing  the  Johnsonian  faithful  at 
Lichfield,  and  he  startles  them  with  the  imagined 
presence  of  Johnson  lumbering  into  that  congre- 
gation and  asking  what  the  nonsense  is  all  about. 
He  is  talking  at  St.  Andrews  on  the  five  hundredth 
anniversary  of  the  University,  and  he  conjures  up 
the  first  Rector,  endows  him  with  an  immortality 
in  the  flesh,  and  through  those  conjectured  eyes  sees 
the  whole  procession  of  events  in  the  world  during 
half  a  millennium.  He  is  addressing  the  burgesses 
of  Bristol  on  the  subject  of  their  former  member 
Burke,  and  he  quotes  to  them  Burke's  words  : 
"  What  shadows  we  are  and  what  shadows  we  pur- 
sue," with  the  comment  that  they  *'  sum  up  the  life 
of  every  politician,  and  perhaps  of  every  man."  It 
was  always  his  habit  to  view  the  events  of  a  genera- 
tion (as  a  historian  must)  in  the  light  of  the  events 
of  centuries  and  (as  an  imaginative  artist  will)  the 
events  of  centuries  in  the  light  of  eternity.  The  pro- 
cesses of  time  have  always  haunted  him,  and  the 
mysteries  of  human  existence  and  human  pain  and 
doubt.  It  was  characteristic  of  him  that  in  one  of 
the  earliest  of  serious  addresses,  delivered  to  the 

178 


LORD  ROSEBERY'S  MISCELLANIES 

students  of  Aberdeen  in  1880,  he  should  have  re- 
minded the  students,  Uttle  younger  than  himself, 
of  the  Dance  of  Death  : 

Day  by  day  the  horizon  of  human  possibility, 
which  now  lies  so  unbounded  before  you,  must 
contract  ;  the  time  must  come  when,  under  the 
stroke  of  illness  or  the  decay  of  nature,  hope  and 
health,  the  pride  and  power  of  Hfe  and  intellect, 
which  now  seem  so  inseparable  from  your  triumph- 
ant youth,  will  have  passed  away. 

We  can  confidently  deduce  that  such  reflections 
were  never  far  from  him  ;  that  they  crossed  his 
mind  at  Cabinet  meetings,  on  platforms  when 
thousands  were  cheering  some  joke  or  poHtical 
announcement,  in  rooms  where  diplomatic  chaffer- 
ings  were  proceeding  over  tables.  This  is  what  it 
means  to  be  of  an  imaginative  and  reflective  habit  ; 
it  is  sometimes  a  handicap  and  sometimes  a  great 
help. 

Lord  Rosebery  says  there  w^ere  a  hundred  Glad- 
stones. There  may  have  been  ;  but  they  all  got  on 
very  happily  together  ;  the  complexity  in  Glad- 
stone's heart  and  brain  was  not  so  great  as  that  in 
his  own.  Behind  this  book,  and  his  other  books, 
and  all  his  career,  one  is  aware  of  a  strange  congeries 
of  inhabitants  in  that  one  form,  the  ambitious  and 
versatile  man  of  afl?"airs  living  with  the  meditative 
student  of  mortality,  the  elegant  and  cultivated 
Georgian  senator  with  the  melancholy  artist  of  the 
Romantic  period.  He  has  never  paraded  his  more 
intimate  solicitudes  ;  on  the  contrary,  he  has  desired 

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to  preserve  an  exterior  urbanity,  to  be  objective  in 
his  attitude,  reticent  in  his  expression.  But  his  tem- 
perament was  always  far  too  strongly  coloured  for 
any  pride  or  any  code  of  manners  to  be  able  entirely 
to  counteract  it  ;  it  is  plain  that  he  always  has  been 
conscious  of  his  every  word  and  act,  and,  deUber- 
ately  or  not,  his  essays  let  us  into  the  dominant 
preoccupations,  temporal  and  eternal,  of  his  mind. 
What  these  are  may  be  left  to  the  reader  to  discover  ; 
but  it  is  clear  that  he  has  always  been  exercised  by 
the  problem  as  to  whether  a  born  man  of  letters  is 
ever  wise  in  allowing  himself  to  be  swallowed  up 
by  politics. 


1 80 


MINOR  CAROLINES 

THE  third  volume  of  Mr.  Saintsbury's  re- 
prints of  lesser  Caroline  poets  was  announced 
before  the  war.  The  war  held  it  up.  It  has  now 
appeared. 

There  is  a  slight  distinction  between  it  and  its 
predecessors.  In  the  first  two  volumes  the  poets 
were  distinctly  minor  minors.  The  best  of  them  all 
was  probably  Katherine  Philips  (Orinda).  The 
others  were  mainly  curiosities  ;  at  best  poets  who 
once  or  twice  "  came  off."  There  was  Benlow^es,  the 
eccentric  who  ruined  himself  by  benefactions  to 
needy  poets,  and  whose  "  Theophila  "  was  put 
through  the  press  with  such  unremitting  assiduity 
and  such  fluctuating  intentions  that  scarcely  any 
two  copies  contain  the  same  number  of  plates.  There 
was  Chamberlayne,  w^hose  "  Pharonnida  "  is  an 
immense  narrative  dunghill,  in  which  the  otherwise 
unoccupied  may  search  for,  and  sometimes  find, 
pearls.  There  was  Chalkhill,  who  wrote  a  charming 
song  ;  Patrick  Carey,  whom  Sir  Walter  Scott 
temporarily  revived  ;  Philip  Ayres,  who  wrote 
sonnets  when  sonnets  were  not  in  fashion  ;  Kynaston 
and  Hall,  who  rose  to  great  heights  at  isolated 
moments  ;  Hannay,  who  is  dull  ;  Godolphin,  who 
was  a  plaster  imitation  of  a  good  poet  ;  and  others. 
But  the  new  volume  contains  poets  of  greater  stature 
than  these.  The  first  three  are  Cleveland,  Stanley, 
and  King. 

Cleveland  we  may  perhaps  pass  as  not  much 
above  the  level  of  the  others.  His  works  were  very 

i8i 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

popular  after  the  Restoration,  because  he  had 
lampooned  the  Puritans  with  notable  offensiveness. 
There  are  splendid  bits  of  invective  in  him  as  there 
are  in  his  later  congener,  Charles  Churchill  ;  but 
he  was  less  of  a  poet  than  Churchill,  and  his  fame 
may  be  greater  than  he  deserves.  Stanley  and  King 
are  far  more  important  people.  Thomas  Stanley, 
author  of  a  once-celebrated  "  History  of  Philosophy," 
opulent  friend  and  patron  of  half  the  most  gifted 
men  of  his  age,  was  as  a  poet  a  link  between  Donne 
and  his  followers  and  the  song- writers  of  the  Restora- 
tion. *'  Expectation,"  which  begins  : 

Chide,  chide  no  more  away 
The  fleeting  daughters  of  the  day. 
Nor  with  impatient  thoughts  outrun 
The  lazy  sun. 

is  of  the  age  of  Herbert,  but  the  accents  of  another 
generation  are  anticipated  in  *'  The  Relapse  "  (pub- 
lished 1 651),  which  opens  : 

O  !  turn  away  those  cruel  eyes, 

The  stars  of  my  undoing  ! 
Or  death  in  such  a  bright  disguise 

May  tempt  a  second  wooing. 

In  both  moods  and  in  both  measures  he  sometimes 
got  near  perfection,  and  no  general  anthology  of 
English  verse  can  pretend  to  be  representative  which 
does  not  contain  several  of  his  poems.  As  much 
may  be  said  of  Bishop  King,  of  Chichester,  who 
Uved  from  1592  to  1669.  His  ''  Exequy  on  his  Wife  " 

182 


MINOR  CAROLINES 

has  often  been  reprinted,  and  can  never  be  re- 
printed too  often.  There  is  no  more  affecting  fare- 
well in  all  English  poetry  than  its  closing  lines  : 

Sleep  on,  my  Love,  in  thy  cold  bed 

Never  to  be  disquieted  ! 

My  last  good  night  !    Thou  wilt  not  wake 

Till  I  thy  fate  shall  overtake  : 

Till  age,  or  grief,  or  sickness  must 

Marry  my  body  to  that  dust 

It  so  much  loves  ;  and  fill  the  room 

Thy  heart  keeps  empty  in  thy  tomb. 

Stay  for  me  there  :  I  will  not  fail 

To  meet  thee  in  that  hollow  vale.  .  .  . 

''  The  Departure,"  "  Brave  Flowers,"  and  *'  Tell 
Me  No  More  "  are  in  the  same  category.  He  is 
certainly  a  minor  poet  in  the  Hght  of  the  major  poets  ; 
but  compared  to  Chamberlayne  or  Ayres  he  is 
gigantic.  These  and  two  others.  Whiting  and  Flat- 
man,  are  included  in  the  new  volume.  The  texts 
have  been  carefully  revised  with  the  assistance  of 
Mr.  Percy  Simpson  and  Mr.  Thom-Drury,  and 
the  notes  are  as  full  and  as  racy  as  Mr.  Saintsbury 
alone  could  make  them.  It  is  a  pleasure  to  see  him 
thumping  Roundheads  again  in  the  old  way.  Every 
page  of  text  is  welcome  ;  but  there  is  one  poet  for 
whom  we  may  acknowledge  an  especial  debt  to 
Mr.  Saintsbury. 

Of  Cleveland  there  is  a  modern  edition  made  by 
one  of  those  industrious  American  gentlemen  who 
write  theses  for  the  doctorate  or  engage  themselves, 
at  the  behest  of  their  universities,  on  works  of  post- 
graduate research.  King  was  in  the  main  edited  by 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Archdeacon  Hannah  eighty  years  ago,  and  Stanley's 
lyrics  and  some  of  his  translations  are  accessible 
(though  they  were  not  when  Mr.  Saintsbury  first 
planned  his  edition)  in  the  edition  prepared  by  the 
late  Louise  Imogen  Guiney  and  published  in  1907 
by  the  late  J.  R.  Tutin,  of  Hull,  one  of  the  orna- 
ments of  the  English  bookselling  trade.  All  these 
poets  are  in  a  manner  accessible,  though  Mr.  Saints- 
bury's  editions  will  certainly  supersede  all  previous 
ones.  Whiting  and  Flatman  are  in  different  case. 
Neither  has  ever  been  edited  in  modern  times,  and 
there  is,  I  beUeve,  no  issue  of  cither's  poems  later 
than  the  seventeenth  century.  That  Whiting  has 
not  been  edited  I  do  not,  after  reading  his  works, 
feel  surprised  at.  He  is  a  lumbering  narrator,  with 
a  grovelling  mind  and  a  style  full  of  pedantry  and 
made  metaphors.  He  was  a  '*  character  "  and  is 
amusing  to  meet  once  ;  but  it  is  likely  that  the 
English  language  will  die  out  of  the  world  before 
another  Mr.  Saintsbury  arises  to  give  him  a  second 
resurrection.  But  in  editing  Flatman  (and,  in- 
cidentally, unearthing  several  of  his  poems  from 
manuscript)  Mr.  Saintsbury  has  added  one  more  to 
the  long  series  of  substantial  services  that  he  has 
done  to  English  poetry. 

Thomas  Flatman  was  (probably)  a  Norfolk  man, 
of  Winchester  and  New  College,  who  was  born  in 
1635  ^^^  ^^^^  i^  1688.  He  is  the  most  neglected  of 
the  genuine  poets  of  the  Restoration  period.  Several 
of  them  still  want  thorough  editing  :  Dorset,  Cotton, 
Buckingham,  Sedley,  and  the  almost  great  Rochester 
are  known  to  most  readers  of  poetry  only  through 
selections  in   anthologies.   But   Flatman   only  just 

184 


MINOR  CAROLINES 

peeps  into  the  anthologies,  and  even  there  he  seems 
to  escape  notice.  Except  in  the  catalogues  of  Messrs. 
Sotheby  and  Hodgson — his  editions  are  all  rare  and 
fetch  large  prices — I  doubt  if  his  name  ordinarily 
appears  in  print  once  a  year.  Probably  it  is  the  said 
name  that  has  done  for  his  reputation  ;  a  poet  might 
almost  as  well  be  called  John  Proser,  Henry  Dullard, 
or  Christopher  Numskull.  But  he  was  at  times  a 
goodish  poet,  and  one  may  say  of  him,  as  one  can 
of  several  of  his  contemporaries,  that  had  he  been 
born  in  another  generation  he  would  have  been  a 
better  one.  He  was  not  a  consummate  song- writer, 
but  some  of  his  songs  are  graceful  ;  and  he  had  a 
particular  faculty  of  getting  touches  of  simplicity, 
of  humour,  and  of  imagination  into  the  most  pomp- 
ous-looking of  pindarics.  It  w^as  not  for  nothing 
that  one  of  his  friends  was  Dr.  Walter  Pope,  the 
wag  who  wrote  that  charming  domestic  poem,  "  The 
Old  Man's  Wish  "  ;  and  on  the  other  hand  Mr. 
Saintsbury  is  fully  justified  in  saying  that  he  is  dis- 
tinguished from  his  contemporaries  by  having  in- 
herited from  the  previous  generation  a  constant, 
though  not  a  morbid,  preoccupation  with  Death. 
**  No  more  !  Alas  !  that  bitter  word.  No  more  !  " 
the  opening,  both  in  sentiment  and  in  expression, 
is  foreign  to  his  time.  And  Wordsworth  himself 
can  scarcely  have  written  with  a  more  simple  direct- 
ness than  Flatman  did  in  his  "  song  "  on  the  same 
subject  : 

Oh,  the  sad  day. 

When  friends  shall  shake  their  heads  and  say 
Of  miserable  me, 

185 


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Hark !  how  he  groans,  look  how  he  pants  for  breath, 
See  how  he  struggles  with  the  pangs  of  Death  1 
When  they  shall  say  of  these  poor  eyes, 
How  hollow  and  how  dim  they  be  ! 
Mark  how  his  breast  does  swell  and  rise 
Against  his  potent  Enemy  ! 

When  some  old  friend  shall  step  to  my  bedside, 
Touch  my  chill  face,  and  thence  shall  gently  sHde, 

And  when  his  next  companions  say. 
How  does  he  do  !  What  hopes  ?  shall  turn  away, 

Answering  only  with  a  lift-up  hand, 
Who  can  his  fate  withstand  ? 

Flatman  could  not  long  remain  at  this  level  of 
solemnity,  though  the  solemnity  was  genuine.  He 
had  to  finish  the  poem  with  : 

Then  shall  a  gasp  or  two  do  more 

Than  e'er  my  rhetoric  could  before, 

Persuade  the  peevish  world  to  trouble  me  no  more  ! 

That  whimsical  note  often  recurs.  Perhaps  the 
most  characteristic  poem  of  all  is  that  in  which  he 
very  brazenly  preaches  his  doctrine  of  "  Anything 
for  a  quiet  life."  He  calls  it,  sHghtly  Ubelling  himself 
in  the  title,  "  The  Unconcerned,"  and  it  was  written 
at  a  time  of  great  mundane  convulsions  : 

Now  that  the  world  is  all  in  a  maze, 
Drums  and  trumpets  rending  heav'ns. 

Wounds  a-bleeding,  mortals  dying. 

Widows  and  orphans  piteously  crying  ; 

i86 


MINOR  CAROLINES 

Armies  marching,  towns  in  a  blaze, 

Kingdoms  and  States  at  sixes  and  sevens  ; 
What  should  an  honest  fellow  do, 
Whose  courage,  and  fortunes  run  equally  low  ? 
Let  him  live,  say  I,  till  his  glass  be  run. 
As  easily  as  he  may  ; 
Let  the  wine,  and  the  sand  of  his  glass  flow  to- 
gether, 
For  life's  but  a  winter's  day. 

Alas  !  from  sun  to  sun, 
The  time's  very  short,  very  dirty  the  weather, 
And  we  silently  creep  away. 
Let  him  nothing  do,  he  could  wish  undone  ; 
And  keep  himself  safe  from  the  noise  of  gun. 

It  may  not  be  the  most  laudable  kind  of  outlook, 
but  it  is  a  common  one,  and  it  has  seldom  been  so 
felicitously  expressed.  It  is  reflected  again  in  "  The 
Whim,"  which  is  too  long  to  quote  bodily,  but  of 
which  I  may  give  the  first  stanza  : 

Why  so  serious,  w^hy  so  grave  ? 

Man  of  business,  why  so  muddy  ? 
Thyself  from  Chance  thou  can'st  not  save, 

With  all  thy  care  and  study. 
Look  merrily  then,  and  take  thy  repose  ; 
For  'tis  to  no  purpose  to  look  so  forlorn. 
Since  the  World  was  as  bad  before  thou  wert  born. 

And  when  it  will  mend  w^ho  knows  ? 

And  a  thousand  years  hence  'tis  all  one, 
If  thou  lay'st  on  a  dunghill,  or  sat'st  on  a  throne. 

*'  Sit  the  comedy  out,  and  that  done.  When  the 
play's  at  an  end  let  the  curtain  fall  down."  All  things 

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will  be  swept  away  by  Time.  *'  Hereafter  no  more 
thought  on  than  my  rhyme,  Or  faery  kingdoms  in 
Utopia."  ''  When  the  puling  fit  of  Life  is  gone,  The 
worst  that  cruel  man  can  do  is  done."  He  was,  when 
writing  most  convincingly,  something  of  a  pessimist ; 
but  it  didn't  seem  greatly  to  upset  him.  He  was  a 
quiet  and  sensible  man.  In  another  age  he  might 
have  been  a  religious  poet,  in  that  age  he  avoided 
the  fashionable  extremes  of  cynicism  and  reckless- 
ness. Cotton,  Walton,  and  Pope  were  among  his 
friends.  Rochester  jeered  at  him,  and  his  reply  was  an 
eloquent  and  touching  tribute  when  Rochester  died. 
Mr.  Saintsbury  has  now  concluded  his  collection. 
He  had  intended  to  reprint  several  very  small  writers, 
including  Heath  and  Flecknoe,  each  of  whom  wrote 
lines  of  some  beauty.  These  had  to  be  omitted  ; 
very  likely  nobody  may  wish  to  print  them  now. 
The  work  must  have  been  one  of  immense  labour, 
and  it  is  difficult  to  realise  that  it  is  only  a  drop  in 
the  vast  ocean  of  Mr.  Saintsbury 's  production. 
Even  now,  though  he  is  over  eighty,  and  has  vowed 
that  his  delicious  ''  Notes  on  a  Cellar  Book  "  shall 
be  his  last  compilation,  one  would  not  be  surprised 
were  he  suddenly  to  undertake  some  new  and 
elephantine  postscript.  There  are  certainly  plenty 
of  things  left  which  he  might  profitably  have  done, 
and  which  it  is  to  be  hoped  some  later  scholar  with 
one  half  his  enthusiasm  and  energy  may  arise  to 
carry  through.  The  collectors  and  the  editors  be- 
tween them  have  now  fairly  thoroughly  sorted  out 
and  made  accessible  all  the  Elizabethans  who  are 
worth  anything  and  all  the  CaroUnes,  but  our  know- 
ledge of  the  Restoration,  Augustan,  and  Georgian 

i88 


MINOR  CAROLINES 

ages  is  still  very  imperfect.  The  greater  poets  have 
been  edited,  and  it  may  freely  be  admitted  that  the 
minors  of  those  ages  are  not  on  the  same  plane  as 
their  predecessors.  But  there  is  far  more  worth  in 
the  poetry  which  came  between  Milton  and  Words- 
worth than  is  commonly  allowed.  The  miscellanies 
and  song  books  have  not  been  explored  ;  even  so 
powerful  a  writer  as  Rochester  has  not  been  edited  ; 
and  there  are  many  charming  poems  to  be  routed 
out  and  assigned  to  their  places  in  their  authors' 
works.  Granted  the  difference  ;  but  why  should  a 
hundred  people  know  Wither 's  songs  to  one  who 
knows  Walsh's  "  The  Despairing  Lover,"  and  why 
should  Waller's  "  Go,  Lovely  Rose,"  be  familiar  to 
thousands  who  have  never  heard  of  Broome's 
scarcely  less  beautiful  apostrophe  ?  Jago  and  Cuth- 
bert  Shaw  were  much  truer  poets  than  Whiting  or 
Godolphin,  whom  Mr.  Saintsbury  has  considered 
worthy  of  an  edition,  and  we  can  go  higher  than 
them.  Who  has  edited  John  Dyer  ?  It  is  into  these 
fields  that  the  next  generation  of  scholars  will  move 
on.  They  will  not  find  them  as  rich  as  the  pastures 
in  which  Lamb  and  Dyce,  Grosart  and  BuUen, 
ranged  ;  but  they  will  not  find  them  barren.  Un- 
fortunately few  of  them  as  yet  seem  to  have  realised 
the  direction  in  which  they  will  have  to  move  if 
they  are  to  be  of  any  service.  Young  students  of  the 
late  seventeenth  and  the  eighteenth  centuries,  who 
will  carry  on  the  work  of  Mr.  Gosse,  the  late  Austin 
Dobson,  and  the  omnipresent  Mr.  Saintsbury,  and 
produce  editions  where  those  men  produced  his- 
tories, are  yet  to  be  discovered. 


189 


MEDIi^VAL  ENGLISH  POETRY 

IT  used  to  be,  and  to  a  deplorable  extent  still  is, 
the  fashion  to  say  and  to  suppose  that  Chaucer 
(with  the  possible  exception  of  Beowulf)  was  the 
only  thing  that  mattered  in  English  poetry  before 
the  Renaissance.  Chaucer  was  a  freak  born  out  of 
time,  and  owing  his  quality  largely  to  direct  contact 
with  French  and  Italian  influences.  There  was  Piers 
Plowman,  a  document.  There  were  Hoccleve,  Lyd- 
gate,  and  Gower,  dull  monks  who  passed  their 
time  making  immense  moral  poems  because  they 
had  nothing  else  to  do.  In  John  Skelton  were  to  be 
found  the  rugged  beginnings  of  English  poetry  as 
it  has  developed  in  the  last  four  hundred  years. 

Modern  research  has  gradually  undermined  this 
theory,  and  in  recent  years  more  and  more  of  the 
results  of  exploration  have  been  made  accessible  to 
the  ordinary  intelligent  reader  who  does  not  care  a 
dump  for  the  differences  betw-een  the  dialects  of 
Wessex  and  Mercia,  and  is  content  to  let  others 
decide  for  him  the  interesting  points  arising  from  a 
comparison  of  Text  A  with  Text  B  and  Text  C. 
*'  Pearl  "  and  "  Gawayne  and  the  Green  Knight  " 
are  now  fairly  widely  known  ;  Dunbar  and  Henry- 
son  have  been  rescued  from  neglect  ;  Richard  RoUe 
is  recognised  as  an  important  figure  in  the  history  of 
mysticism  ;  the  Miracle  Plays  are  receiving  an  in- 
creased amount  of  attention  ;  and,  above  all,  the 
best  of  the  mediaeval  lyrics  have  been  introduced 
to  a  large  public  through  the  medium  of  collections 
such  as  Sir  Arthur  Quiller- Couch's.  It  would  be  a 

190 


MEDIAEVAL  ENGLISH  POETRY 

strong-minded  anthologist  who  could  now  begin  a 
representative  book  of  English  verse  with  anything 
later  than  "  Sumer  is  a-cumin  in." 

Mr.  Sisam's  book,  Fourteenth  Century  Verse  and 
Prose,  should  continue  the  process  of  readjustment. 
He  gives  extracts  from  the  w^ork  of  a  single  century, 
the  century  of  Edward  H,  Edward  HI,  and  Richard 
H.  It  was  not  perhaps  the  most  interesting  of  the 
centuries  if  we  consider  it,  as  he  does,  with  Chaucer 
left  out.  The  first  freshness  of  the  spring  song  had 
died.  The  South  (source  of  most  of  our  poetry)  was 
largely  silent  ;  the  note  of  the  North  was  grim  ;  the 
misfortunes  arising  from  war,  famine,  and  plague 
bred  a  school  of  stern  moralists  ;  the  new  modes 
of  rhyme  fought  it  out  against  a  revival  of  the  old 
alliterative  blank  verse.  But  as  Mr.  Sisam  says,  a 
man  who  reads  mediaeval  literature  without  taking 
an  interest  in  mediaeval  life  is  greatly  handicapped  ; 
and  in  the  works  he  quotes,  works  almost  all  of  artistic 
merit,  we  get  much  light  on  the  life  of  the  time — 
the  social  changes,  the  popular  outlook,  the  mind 
of  the  Church,  the  risings  and  the  winds  of  doctrine, 
trade,  art,  and  the  family.  Gower,  Wiclif,  Mande- 
ville,  Barbour,  Michael  of  Northgate,  Langland  : 
these  are  amongst  the  authors  on  whom  he  draws. 
His  selections  are  excellently  made,  introduced  and 
annotated.  He  ends  with  pieces  from  the  York  and 
Towneley  plays,  a  few  political  pieces  (including 
some  of  Minot's  political  songs),  and  nine  miscel- 
laneous lyrics.  *'  Now  Springs  the  Spray  "  is  one 
of  the  loveliest  and  least  known  of  these  ;  there  is 
also  a  song  jesting  at  the  noise  and  puffing  in  a  black- 
smith's shop  which  is  in  the  true  line  of  our  national 

191 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

humour.  A  more  extensive  view  of  our  fourteenth 
century  and  other  early  lyric  poetry  may  be  obtained 
from  the  other  book  under  review. 

How  great  was  the  lyrical  wealth  of  the  Middle 
Ages  is  illustrated  by  the  volume  of  Early  English 
Lyrics  compiled  by  Messrs.  Chambers  and  Sidg- 
wick.  This  book  first  appeared  in  1907  ;  the  pub- 
lication of  a  second  impression  now  suggests  that 
it  has  had  a  slow  but  steady  sale.  Its  contents  cover 
the  ground  from  the  thirteenth  century  to  Skelton 
and  Henry  the  Eighth,  the  advent  of  the  sonnet 
with  Wyatt  and  Surrey  being  regarded  as  the  symp- 
tom of  a  new  poetical  age.  We  know,  as  Mr.  Sisam 
says,  that  we  can  have  only  fragmentary  remains  of 
the  lyric  poetry,  and  especially  of  the  secular  lyric 
poetry,  of  those  centuries.  What  we  have  we  have 
only  from  manuscripts.  Almost  the  only  repositories 
of  the  manuscripts  were  monasteries.  The  monas- 
teries naturally  had  a  prejudice  in  favour  of  sober 
and  instructive  compositions.  In  addition  to  this 
the  shorter  poems,  and  the  homelier  of  the  longer 
ones,  were  the  stock-in-trade  of  travelling  minstrels 
and  story-tellers,  who  would  not  have  been  over- 
anxious to  disseminate  their  treasures  in  writing. 
Yet  the  contents  of  this  volume  can  be  compared 
without  too  disastrous  a  result  with  any  volume  of 
equal  size  of  EHzabethan  lyrics.  The  carols  and  re- 
ligious poems,  particularly  those  in  praise  of  the 
Virgin,  are  the  most  numerous.  They  include  such 
exquisite  things  as  "  Of  a  rose,  a  lovely  rose,"  and 
**  I  sing  of  a  maiden  That  is  makeles,"  and  *'  This 
flower  is  faire  and  fresche  of  hewe,"  which  was 
never  printed  until  it  appeared  in  this  book.  They 

192 


MEDIAEVAL  ENGLISH  POETRY 

include  also  "  Quia  Amore  Langueo,"  the  author 
of  which,  were  his  name  known,  would  have  a  great 
reputation  on  that  alone  : 

In  a  valey  of  this  restles  minde 

I  soughte  in  mounteine  and  in  mede, 
Trustinge  a  trewe  love  for  to  finde. 

Upon  a  hill  than  I  took  hede  ; 

A  voice  I  herde,  and  neer  I  yede, 
In  huge  dolour  complaininge  tho, 

''  See,  dere  soule,  how  my  sides  blede, 
Quia  amore  langueo." 

Yet  the  religious  poems  are  not,  save  in  number, 
more  notable  than  the  others.  The  "  Nut- Brown 
Maid  "  is  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  the  language. 
*'  Alison  "  is  another.  They  are  richly  comic  lyrics 
like  that  spoken  by  a  man  concerning  his  wife,  which 
has  for  refrain  :  "I  dare  not  seyn  when  she  seith 
*  Pes,*  "  which,  being  interpreted,  means  "  Peace." 
Religion  and  the  mystic  life  of  mediaeval  England 
join  hands  in  the  deUcious  poem  which  begins  : 

The  shepard  upon  a  hill  he  satt  ; 
He  had  on  him  his  tabard  and  his  hat, 
His  tarbox,  his  pipe,  and  his  flagat  ; 
His  name  was  called  Joly  Joly  Wat, 

For  he  was  a  gud  herdes  boy. 
Ut  hoy  ! 

For  in  his  pipe  he  made  so  much  joy. 

and  the  roots  of  half  our  nursery  rhymes  can  be 
seen  in  : 

193  o 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

I  have  a  gentil  cok 

Croweth  me  day  ; 
He  doth  me  risen  erly 

My  matines  for  to  say. 

I  have  a  gentil  cok  ; 

Comen  he  is  of  grete  ; 
His  comb  is  of  red  correl, 

His  tail  is  of  get. 

Ever3^where,  by  the  way,  new  rhythms  and  new 
stanzas  are  to  be  found,  the  art  has  spontaneity  but 
the  spontaneity  has  art.  Scarcely  a  lyric  measure 
that  we  love  to  use  but  can  be  traced  to  these  old 
poems.  There  was  plenty  of  intelligence  and  plenty 
of  ear  and  precisely  the  English  feeling  we  know 
behind  such  a  stanza  as  : 

Alone  walking. 

In  thought  pleyning. 

And  sore  sighing. 

All  desolate, 
The  remembring 
Of  my  living. 
My  deth  wishing, 

Both  erly  and  late.  .  .  . 

And  there  are  still  scores  of  others  to  mention,  in- 
cluding the  glorious  spring  song  (1325),  which 
begins  : 

Lenten  ys  come  with  love  to  toune 

With  blosmen  and  with  briddes  roune.  .  .  . 

194 


MEDIAEVAL  ENGLISH  POETRY 

In  time,  presumably,  we  shall  get  the  literature 
of  the  Middle  Ages  better  in  perspective.  We  can- 
not hope,  unfortunately,  to  recover  the  names  of 
the  men  who  wrote  the  lyric  masterpieces,  and  no 
great  proportion  of  the  lost  poems  is  now  Hkely  to 
be  recovered.  But  the  historians  will  stop  talking  of 
Chaucer  as  a  solitary  lighthouse  in  a  dark  sea,  and 
tiresomely  recounting  the  names  of  Lydgate  and 
Hoccleve  as  those  of  two  dullards  who  happen  to 
be  remembered  because  there  is  nothing  better  to 
remember.  But  it  is  not  easy  to  impress  the  merits 
of  the  thirteenth,  fourteenth,  and  fifteenth  centuries 
upon  the  ordinary  reader,  and  the  reason  is  that  he 
will  not  take  enough  trouble — and  after  all  why 
should  he  ? — about  the  language.  "  Love  is  Life," 
by  Richard  Rolle  of  Hampole,  is  a  beautiful,  simple 
and  moving  poem.  But  what  is  the  reader  who  is 
not  a  scholar,  or  very  persistent,  to  make  of  a  stanza 
like  this  : 

Luf  es  a  lyght  byrthen  ;  lufe  gladdes  yong  and  aide  ; 
Lufe  es  withowten  pyne,  as  lofers  base  me  talde  ; 
Lufe  es  a  gastly  wyne,  that  makes  men  bygge  and 

balde  ; 
Of  lufe  sale  he  na  thyng  tyne  that  hit  in  hert  will 

halde. 

The  spelling  will  puzzle  the  reader  ;  he  will  probably 
think  that  "  gastly  "  means  "  ghastly  "  and  that 
''  balde  "  means  "  bald,"  a  reading  which  at  once 
gives  the  poem  a  facetious  air.  When  you  add  to 
this  that  some  of  the  words  are  written,  not  as  I 
have  written  them,  but  are  sprinkled  with  strange 

195 


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signs  meaning  ''  th,"  or  '*  gh,"  or  ''  g,"  or  "  y,"  or 
"  z,"  and  that  it  is  not  always  certain  which  of  these 
transUterations  is  intended,  we  have  something 
which  seems  almost  as  formidable  to  the  lay  eye  as 
would  be  the  inscriptions  of  the  Egyptians  or  the 
constitution  of  Jugo-Slavia.  Robert  Mannynge  of 
Brunne,  who  flourished  between  1300  and  1350,  is 
quoted  by  Mr.  Sisam  as  explaining  that  he  writes 
simple  language,  without  literary  affectations  or 
elaborate  versification,  in  order  that  everybody  may 
understand  him.  This  is  how  he  puts  it  : 

Haf  I  alle  in  myn  Inglis  layd 
In  symple  speeche  as  I  conthe. 
That  is  lightest  in  manes  mouthe. 
I  mad  noght  for  no  disours, 
Ne  for  no  seggers,  no  harpours, 
But  for  the  luf  of  symple  men 
That  strange  Inglis  can  not  keen  ; 
For  many  it  ere  that  strange  Inglis 
In  ryme  wate  never  wate  it  is, 
And  bot  thai  wist  what  it  mente, 
Alis  me  thought  it  were  all  schente. 

It  is  hard  luck  on  a  man  who  was  so  determined  to 
be  comprehensible  to  all  that  time  should  have 
done  to  his  verses  what  he  deliberately  abstained 
from  doing  to  them  himself.  But  there  it  is  :  to  the 
ordinary  reader  of  English  literature  gibberish  with- 
out swarms  of  footnotes. 

The  nearest  thing  we  can  get  to  a  remedy  is 
modernisation.  Few  modernised  versions  of  the  old 
poems  are  likely  to  be  as  good  as  the  originals  ; 

196 


MEDIEVAL  ENGLISH  POETRY 

something  in  sense  and  in  sound  is  almost  sure  to 
be  lost.  Literal  reprints  can  never  be,  and  should 
never  be,  superseded  ;  we  must  have  the  texts  and 
we  must  train  the  scholars.  But  a  whole  bookfull 
of  poems  in  Middle  English  is  to  most  lovers  of 
literature  a  sealed  bookfull.  Let  us  regard  the  opera- 
tion as  translation  (always  considered  permissible), 
and  translation  of  which  nine-tenths  of  the  work  is 
happily  done  in  advance.  Messrs.  Sidgwick  and 
Chambers  set  a  good  example  by  modernising  the 
speUing  of  the  later  poems  in  their  volume.  There 
is  no  reason  why  some  other  scholar,  of  equal  taste 
and  practical  facility,  should  not  present  us  with  a 
large  volume,  containing  a  representative  selection 
of  mediaeval  poetry,  with  words  we  understand, 
ingeniously  substituted  for  words  w^e  do  not  under- 
stand, and  the  doubtful  points  of  metre  made  clear. 


197 


MARK  AKENSIDE 

CENTENARY  articles  are  rather  a  bore  to 
write  when  everybody  is  writing  them.  On 
the  present  occasion,  however,  I  cannot  feel  certain 
that  anybody  else  will  remember  the  centenary. 
However,  here  is  notice  to  the  town  of  Newcastle- 
on-Tyne  and  all  whom  it  may  concern.  Mark  Aken- 
side,  the  poet,  was  born  on  November  the  ninth,  1721 ; 
and,  although  not  as  good  as  his  friends  thought 
him,  he  deserves  the  passing  tribute  of  a  paragraph. 

He  was  born  at  Newcastle,  the  son  of  a  butcher. 
When  he  was  seven  years  old  he  received  a  wound 
from  the  paternal  cleaver,  as  a  result  of  which  he 
was — like  Byron  and  Scott  it  has  been  observed — 
lame  for  life.  In  1739  he  went  to  Edinburgh  as  a 
student  of  theology.  He  came  to  pray  and  remained 
to  anatomise  ;  and  in  1741  left  Edinburgh  as  a 
surgeon,  having  printed  a  small  volume  of  poems 
in  the  previous  year.  In  London  he  made  friends 
with  a  Mr.  Dyson,  a  rich  man,  afterwards  privy 
councillor  and  lord  of  the  treasury.  Dyson  took  a 
house  for  him  and  made  him  a  handsome  allowance 
for  the  rest  of  his  life — the  sort  of  thing  that  never 
happens  to  poets  now.  From  1746  onwards  he  wrote 
very  little  poetry,  though  he  revised  a  good  deal  ; 
he  made  steady  progress  in  his  profession,  wrote 
several  medical  treatises,  delivered  a  remarkable 
Harveian  oration,  and  became  principal  physician 
to  Christ's  Hospital.  He  died  in  1770,  aged  forty- 
eight,  and  his  poems  were  collected  after  his  death 
by  Dyson  and  issued  in  1772  in  a  handsome  form. 

198 


MARK  AKENSIDE 

Akenside's  poems,  like  those  of  most  of  his  best 
contemporaries,  are  not  very  voluminous.  They 
fill  three  hundred  smallish  pages  in  the  Aldine 
edition  of  his  works,  which  is  the  best  edition  and 
contains  an  excellent  memoir  by  Dyce.  There  are 
the  two  versions  of  "  The  Pleasures  of  the  Imagina- 
tion "  ;  there  are  thirty-three  Odes,  nine  Inscrip- 
tions, ''  The  Epistle  to  Curio,"  and  fewer  than  a 
dozen  other  poems.  In  his  own  day  he  had  a  very 
great  reputation.  When  he  first  appeared  in  London 
the  manuscript  of  "  The  Pleasures  "  was  shown 
by  Dodsley  to  the  dying  Pope,  who  urged  its  pub- 
lication on  the  grounds  that  its  author  (then  only 
twenty-two,  we  should  remember)  was  "  no  every- 
day writer." 

The  public  agreed,  and  for  the  rest  of  his  life, 
and,  indeed,  until  the  end  of  the  century,  Akenside 
was  ranked  with  the  important  English  poets.  A 
few  very  detached  and  wary  people  realised  that 
he  was  not  quite  deserving  of  that.  Gray  said  of  the 
long  poem  that  it  was  "  above  the  middhng,"  and 
that  some  of  the  descriptive  parts  were  very  good, 
but  that  it  was  often  obscure,  unintelligible,  and 
loaded  with  philosophical  jargon  ;  as  for  the  critics, 
he  remarked  that  poems  might  just  as  well  be  judged 
by  *'  the  ladies  that  keep  the  bars  "  in  the  coffee 
houses  as  by  them.  Horace  Walpole  refers  to  him 
contemptuously  as  "  another  of  these  tame  geniuses, 
a  Mr.  Akenside,  who  writes  odes,"  and  Dr.  Johnson 
mingled  his  praise  with  censure  in  a  very  character- 
istic way.  Akenside  had  possessed  "  an  unnecessary 
and  outrageous  zeal  for  what  he  called  and  thought 
liberty  ...  an    impetuous    eagerness    to    subvert 

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and  confound,  with  very  little  care  what  shall  be 
established."  Akenside  was  also  one  of  what  Johnson 
called  ''  the  brethren  of  the  blank  song  "  ;  he 
employed  blank  verse  which  Johnson  disliked  as 
betraying  "  luxuriant  and  active  minds  into  such 
self-indulgence  that  they  pile  image  upon  image, 
ornament  upon  ornament,  and  are  not  easily  per- 
suaded to  close  the  sense  at  all."  When  Johnson 
condemns  him  he  does  it  with  a  relish  which  he 
could  not  help  feeling  when  thumping  a  Radical. 
When  Akenside  is  lyrical  he  talks  of  him  **  laying 
his  ill-fated  hand  upon  his  harp."  "  Of  his  Odes," 
he  says  in  his  "  Life,"  *'  nothing  favourable  can  be 
said  "  ;  and  in  conversation  his  comment  on  the 
pubUcation  of  a  Collected  Akenside  was  :  '*  One 
bad  ode  may  be  suffered,  but  a  number  of  them 
together  makes  one  sick."  Nevertheless,  he  thought 
ultimately  that  Akenside  was  a  better  poet  than 
Gray,  and  for  all  his  criticism  (acute  as  always)  of 
detail,  he  said  that  Akenside 's  longest  poem  showed 
''great  felicity  of  genius,"  and  that  he  had  written 
blank  verse  better  than  most  people. 

The  generality  went  farther  ;  the  ''  Ode  to  the 
Naiads  "  was  perhaps  the  most  highly  esteemed 
short  poem  of  its  age,  and  it  was  not  an  obscure  or 
absurd  contemporary  who  depicted  Akenside  in 
heaven  with  Plato  and  Virgil  weaving  chaplets  for 
him  and  Lucretius  and  Pindar  retiring  modestly 
behind.  Up  to  1820,  and  later,  no  collection  of  the 
poets  was  complete  without  him,  but  the  Romantic 
movement  completely  obscured  him.  He  had  none 
of  those  attributes  which  were  once  more  looked 
for  in  poetry  :   strong  passion,  novel  music,  direct 

200 


MARK  AKENSIDE 

or  vivid  language,  mysticism,  sensuousness.  The 
intellectual  element  in  him  was  the  strongest  ;  his 
verse,  whatever  might  be  said  for  or  against  it,  was 
felt  to  be  the  very  type  of  that  stiffness,  that  poly- 
syllabic orotundity,  that  artificiality  of  image,  against 
which  the  new  poets  revolted.  He  was  more  and 
more  relegated  to  the  histories.  Even  Mr.  Saints- 
bury  finds  nothing  good  in  him  except  the  satirical 
"  Epistle  to  Curio,"  and  to  most  modern  readers  he 
is  merely  a  name,  and  supposed  to  be  a  dull  dog, 
no  more  and  no  less  unreadable  than  Armstrong  or 
the  dozens  of  couplet-writers  and  ode-mongers  w^ho 
flourished  at  the  same  time.  He  is,  it  is  thought, 
merely  a  cold  confectioner,  a  moral  platitudinarian, 
whose  work  may  safely  be  neglected. 

He  will  never  stand  again  where  he  did.  But  if  he 
be  read  for  what  he  can  give  and  not  for  what  he 
cannot  give,  less  contempt  may  be  felt  for  those  who 
once  hailed  him  as  a  great  genius.  The  man  who 
wrote  "  The  Pleasures  of  the  Imagination  "  may 
have  been  a  prig,  and  rather  chilly  ;  but  he  was  no 
fool,  and  there  was  beyond  question  a  poet  in  him. 
The  synopses  to  the  books  are  certainly  enough  to 
make  most  modern  readers  take  to  their  heels.  His 
object,  he  says,  is,  "  by  exhibiting  the  most  engaging 
prospects  of  nature,  to  enlarge  and  harmonise  the 
imagination,  and  by  that  means  insensibly  dispose 
the  minds  of  men  to  a  similar  taste  and  habit  of 
thinking  in  reUgion,  morals,  and  civil  life  "  ;  and 
his  verses  are  introduced  with  summarising  sentences 
such  as  *'  The  separation  of  the  works  of  Imagina- 
tion from  Philosophy,  the  cause  of  their  abuse  among 
the  moderns.  Prospect  of  their  reunion  under  the 

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influence  of  public  Liberty."  He  was  a  severe  young 
man,  and  a  young  man  with  a  system.  Moreover, 
he  could  be  guilty  of  the  worst  eighteenth-century 
excesses  in  pomposity  and  sham  decoration.  The 
stock  epithets  are  everywhere,  and  the  abstractions  : 
his  didacticism  is  grave  and  his  imagery  rather  stiff 
even  in  his  best  passages.  It  is  amusing  to  find  lines 
of  his  which  can  be  paralleled  from  the  Romantics. 
Where  Shelley  writes  : 

Liquid  Peneus  was  flowing 
And  all  dark  Tempe  lay 

Akenside  puts  it  : 

Where,  gliding  through  his  daughter's  honored 

shades. 
The  smooth  Peneus  from  his  glassy  flood 
Reflects  purpureal  Tempe 's  pleasant  scene. 

The  adjectives  are  confusing,  and  Shelley  is  un- 
mistakably better.  Where  Keats  writes  : 

Beauty  is  Truth,  Truth  Beauty,  that  is  all.  .  .  . 

Akenside 's  version  is  : 

For  Truth  and  Good  are  one, 
And  Beauty  dwells  in  them  and  they  in  her, 
With  like  participation. 

This  we  recognise  as  too  complicated  and  prosy  in 
expression.  The  fact  remains  that  Akenside 's  im- 
agination was  struck  by  the  scenes,  and  that  Aken- 
side's  intellect  entertained  the  ideas.  Grant  him  the 

202 


MARK  AKENSIDE 

rather  monumental  style,  and  many  eloquent,  beau- 
tiful, and  interesting  things  will  be  found  in  this 
work  of  a  precocious  youth.  Sometimes  he  even 
stumbles  on  a  simple  and  direct  line,  as  in  the  end 
of  the  passage  where  he  says  he  is  exploring  the  in- 
tellectual abyss  to  gather  a  laurel  culled  : 

Where  never  poet  gained  a  wreath  before, 

and  passages  dignified  and  moving,  in  spite  of  an 
occasional  redundancy,  are  plentiful.  Here  are 
several  : 

Say,  why  was  man  so  eminently  raised 
Amid  the  vast  Creation  ?  why  ordained 
Through  Kfe  and  death  to  dart  his  piercing  eye, 
With  thoughts  beyond  the  limit  of  his  frame  ? 
But  that  the  Omnipotent  might  send  him  forth, 
In  sight  of  mortal  and  immortal  powers, 
As  on  a  boundless  theatre,  to  run 
The  great  career  of  justice  ;  to  exalt 
His  generous  aim  to  all  diviner  deeds  ; 
To  shake  each  partial  purpose  from  his  breast  ; 
And  through  the  mists  of  passion  and  of  sense, 
And  through  the  tossing  tide  of  chance  and  pain, 
To  hold  his  course  unfaltering.  .  .  . 

Now  amazed  she  views 
The  empyreal  waste,  where  happy  spirits  hold, 
Beyond  this  concave  heaven,  their  calm  abode, 
And  fields  of  radiance,  whose  unfading  light 
Has  travelled  the  profound  six  thousand  years. 
Nor  yet  arrives  in  sight  of  mortal  things. 

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On  my  strain, 
Perhaps  even  now,  some  cold,  fastidious  judge 
Casts  a  disdainful  eye  ;    and  calls  my  toil, 
And  casts  the  love  and  beauty  which  I  sing, 
The  dream  of  folly.     Thou,  grave  censor  !  say, 
Is  beauty  then  a  dream,  because  the  glooms 
Of  dulness  hang  too  heavy  on  thy  sense 
To  let  her  shine  upon  thee  ?  So  the  man 
Whose  eye  ne'er  opened  on  the  light  of  heaven. 
Might  smile  with  scorn  while  raptured  vision  tells 
Of  the  gay-coloured  radiance  flushing  bright 
O'er  all  creation. 

If  this  last  passage  is  not  early  Keats,  in  feeUng  and 
expression,  I  should  like  to  know  what  it  is.  The 
last  thing  I  am  going  to  do  is  to  claim  Akenside  as 
one  more  precursor  of  the  Romantic  Revival  ;  but 
he  at  least  had  something  in  common  with  the 
romantic  poets.  The  peroration  of  "  The  Pleasures," 
in  which  God  is  seen  behind  **  the  winds  and  rolling 
waves,  the  sun's  unwearied  course,  the  elements  and 
seasons  "  is  reminiscent  of  Wordsworth  in  expression 
if  the  philosophy  is  Wordsworth's  with  a  difference. 
Gray  said  that  Akenside 's  great  work  was  pub- 
lished nine  years  too  soon.  This  meant  that  Akenside 
would  develop.  He  did  not,  and  the  springs  of  poetry 
almost  dried  up  in  him.  There  is  charm  and  sense 
in  several  of  the  Odes,  such  as  the  **  Hymn  to  Cheer- 
fulness," beginning  : 

How  thick  the  shades  of  evening  close  ! 
How  pale  the  sky  with  weight  of  snows  ! 
Haste,  light  the  tapers,  urge  the  fire, 
And  bid  the  joyless  day  retire. 

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MARK  AKENSIDE 

*'  Amoret  '*  is  deliciously  neat,  and  so  is  "  The 
Complaint,"  and  the  *'  Ode  to  the  Evening  Star  " 
is  one  of  the  sweetest  lyrics  of  the  century.  Its  open- 
ing : 

To  night  retired,  the  queen  of  heaven 
With  young  Endymion  stays.  .  .  . 

is  perfect,  and  the  poem  very  nearly  lives  up  to  it. 
The  description  of  the  nightingale  at  the  wood's 
edge  would  bear  comparison  with  any  other  that 
exists.  Here  is  one  stanza  : 

Hark,  how  through  many  a  melting  note 

She  now  prolongs  her  lays  : 
How  sweetly  down  the  void  they  float  1 
The  breeze  their  magic  path  attends  ; 
The  stars  shine  out  ;   the  forest  bends  ; 

The  wakeful  heifers  gaze. 

There  are  happy  touches  in  even  the  worst  of  the 
shorter  poems,  and  "  The  Epistle  to  Curio,"  an 
onslaught  against  Pulteney,  whom  he  regarded  as  a 
renegade,  has  a  formal  finish  and  a  fierce  sincerity 
which  are  lacking  from  the  livelier  satires  of  Charles 
Churchill.  Akenside  was  not  a  great  poet,  but  the 
revival  of  interest  in  Dyer  should  be  extended  to 
him  also. 

Akenside 's  character  is  not  very  favourably  de- 
picted by  his  biographers.  Only  from  one  or  two  of 
his  poems  can  it  be  deduced  that  he  was  ever  in 
love  ;  he  became,  whatever  he  was  when  young,  a 
stiff  and  formal  bachelor,  vain,  dogmatic,  incHned 
to  lose  his  temper  if  he  were  opposed,  an  obstinate 

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theologian  and  a  peppery  radical.  Smollett  lam- 
pooned him  in  "Peregrine  Pickle,"  and  the  most 
startling  stories  were  told  about  his  brutality  to  the 
poor  patients  at  Christ's  Hospital  : 

If  the  poor  affrighted  patients  did  not  return 
a  direct  answer  to  his  queries,  he  would  often  dis- 
charge them  from  the  hospital.  He  evinced  a  par- 
ticular disgust  to  females,  and  generally  treated 
them  with  harshness.  It  was  stated  that  this 
moroseness  was  occasioned  by  disappointment 
in  love. 

Thus  the  world  saw  him,  and  his  character  was 
thought  to  be  suited  to  his  appearance — the  pale 
face,  the  rigid  figure,  the  precise,  elegant  clothes, 
the  long  sword  and  hobbling  gait.  But  the  sensibility 
and  fancy  which  are  visible  in  his  poems  coloured 
his  conversation  when  among  his  intimates  ;  his 
eloquence,  when  he  got  going,  was  very  impressive ; 
and  his  scholarship  has  been  excelled  by  few  English 
poets. 


206 


WILLIAM  COLLINS 

THE  bi-centenary  of  the  birth  of  WilUam 
ColHns  occurred  last  week  ;  he  was  born  on 
Christmas  Day,  1721.  In  various  quarters  timely 
tributes  were  paid  to  his  memory.  I  should  have 
wTitten  about  Collins  had  I  written  at  all  last  week. 
I  feel  some  doubt  as  to  the  chances  of  my  being 
here  when  his  next  centenary  arrives,  and  I  take 
the  Uberty  of  coming  in  a  week  after  the  fair. 

The  elements  of  Collins 's  biography  are  few  and 
well  known.  He  was  born  on  December  25,  1721, 
at  Chichester,  where  his  father,  a  hatter,  was  twice 
Mayor.  In  1733  he  went  to  Winchester,  where  he 
was  a  friend  of  Joseph  Warton,  and  wrote  a  good 
deal  of  verse.  In  1740  he  went  to  Queen's  College, 
Oxford,  and  in  1741  was  elected  a  Demy  at  Mag- 
dalen. Next  year,  while  still  under  twenty- one,  he 
published  his  "  Persian  Eclogues,"  which  he  had 
begun  at  school.  He  failed  to  obtain  a  fellowship, 
left  Oxford  because  of  his  debts,  came  into  a  legacy, 
and  squandered  it  in  excesses  in  London.  He  con- 
templated entering  the  Church  and  the  Army  ;  his 
uncle,  Colonel  Martin,  said  he  was  "  too  indolent 
even  for  the  army."  At  twenty- five  he  published 
his  "  Odes,"  which  brought  him  the  friendship  of 
Thomson  ;  at  twenty-seven  his  uncle,  the  Colonel, 
left  him  a  small  competency  and  he  retired  to 
Chichester.  His  "  Ode  on  the  Popular  Super- 
stitions of  the  Highlands  "  dates  from  1750.  Nothing 
later  survives.  ColHns  lived  nine  years  more,  but 
they   were    years    of  melancholy   and   intermittent 

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madness.  He  died  at  thirty-seven  and  a  half,  having 
passed  clean  out  of  the  sight  of  literary  London, 
which  nowhere  recorded  his  death. 

Less  than  two  thousand  verses  by  Collins  survive. 
The  number  would  be  slightly  larger  did  we  possess 
everything  he  is  known  to  have  written.  He  pub- 
lished at  Winchester  two  poetical  pamphlets  of 
which  no  copies  are  believed  to  exist,  and  at  the  end 
of  his  productive  career  an  *'  Ode  on  the  Greek 
Theatre,"  which  may  have  ranked  with  his  finest 
works.  But  it  would  be  a  small  volume  at  best  ; 
fertility  was  not  a  characteristic  of  the  poets  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  especially  the  best  poets,  who 
may  be  supposed  to  have  been  cramped  by  the  "  cor- 
rect "  spirit  of  the  time.  ColHns's  poems  are  few, 
and  his  good  poems  are  very  few  indeed.  Any  student 
of  literary  history  must  be  struck  by  the  iteration 
with  which  critics  quote  the  same  few  pieces  by 
him  over  and  over  again.  They  quote,  and  they 
must  quote,  the  first  stanza  of  the  perfect  **  Dirge 
in  Cymbeline  "  : 

To  fair  Fidele's  grassy  tomb 

Soft  maids  and  village  hinds  shall  bring 
Each  opening  sweet,  of  earHest  bloom 

And  rifle  all  the  breathing  Spring. 

They  quote  again  the  stanza,  anticipatory  of  Gray's 
*'  Elegy,"  in  the  unrhymed  "  Ode  to  Evening  "  : 

Now  Air  is  hush'd,  save  where  the  weak-ey'd  Bat, 
With  short  shrill  Shriek  flits  by  on  leathern  Wing. 
Or  where  the  Beetle  winds 
His  small  but  sullen  Horn. 

208 


WILLIAM  COLLINS 

They  quote,  too,  some  part  of  "  How  Sleep  the 
Brave  who  Sink  to  Rest  "  : 

By  fairy  hands  their  knell  is  rung  ; 
By  forms  unseen  their  dirge  is  sung  ; 
There  honour  comes,  a  pilgrim  grey, 
To  deck  the  turf  that  wraps  their  clay  ; 
And  freedom  shall  awhile  repair, 
To  dwell,  a  weeping  hermit  there. 

They  commend  the  "  Ode  to  Pity,"  they  admire 
the  "  Ode  to  the  Passions,"  and  they  find  in  the 
"  Ode  on  the  Popular  Superstitions  of  the  High- 
lands of  Scotland  "  the  germs  of  a  great  deal  of  later 
poetry.  Beyond  these  they  find  little  to  praise  ;  they 
seldom  even  bother  to  hunt  for  excellent  lines  in 
the  "  Eclogues." 

The  volume  of  Collins 's  good  work,  then,  is  very 
small.  Its  quality,  however,  has,  by  general  con- 
sent, given  him  a  high  place  among  the  secondary 
English  poets.  And  the  peculiar  merits  ascribed  to 
him  are  his  occasional  technical  perfection,  his 
beautiful  touches  of  Nature,  and  his  position  as  "  a 
forerunner  of  the  romantic  movement."  When 
reading  dissertations  on  this  last  matter,  and  specu- 
lations as  to  what  Collins  would  have  done  had  he 
been  born  in  another  age,  I  sometimes  wonder 
whether  we  may  not  perhaps  be  in  danger  of  losing 
our  sense  of  proportion  about  him.  He  was  certainly 
a  fine  craftsman  ;  he  had  a  fastidious  ear  and  was 
an  indefatigable  corrector  of  epithets  ;  he  some- 
times struck  off  a  phrase  or  a  stanza  of  classic  per- 
fection. But  there  is  Httle  sign  in  his  external  form 

209  P 


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of  a  revolt  against  the  conventions  of  his  contem- 
poraries, Httle  ground  for  holding  that  he  was,  like 
Blake,  or  like  Christopher  Smart,  demonstrably 
born  out  of  due  time  ;  and  the  more  we  examine 
the  poetic  undergrowth  of  the  age  the  less  import- 
ance shall  we  attach  to  the  natural  images  of  which 
so  much  has  been  made.  To  the  Leigh  Hunt  circle 
the  whole  eighteenth  century  was  bare  of  natural 
images  ;  the  regularity  of  the  eighteenth-century 
forms  and  the  conventionality  of  the  eighteenth- 
century  language  acted  as  a  crust  which  prevented 
these  enthusiasts  in  revolt  from  seeing  anything  at 
all  alive  behind  it.  Later  critics  tended  to  adopt  the 
same  view,  partly  because  of  sheer  ignorance  of 
eighteenth-century  work.  In  our  own  time  the  eight- 
eenth century  is  being  gradually  re-examined,  and 
particularly  with  a  view  to  discovering  natural 
images.  The  result  is  that  traces  of  direct  contact  with 
nature  are  continually  being  found  in  unexpected 
or  obscure  quarters.  Dyer's  "  Grongar  Hill  "  has 
been  rediscovered  ;  there  has  been  a  turn  of  the 
tide  in  favour  of  Thomson  ;  the  search  is  made  not 
entirely  without  success  even  in  Young  and  Aken- 
side  ;  and  we  may  expect  to  find  in  the  near  future 
that  extracts  from  Scott,  Shaw,  Cunningham,  and 
others  will  be  added  to  the  growing  list  of  examples 
proving  that  there  were  alwa*  -^  souls  who  revolted 
against  the  prevalent  habit  of  concealing  strong 
emotion,  and  the  prevalent  refusal  to  look  straight 
at  natural  beauty  and  describe  what  one  saw  and 
felt  in  simple  language. 

CoUins's  historical  eminence  has  partly  been  due 
to  overmuch  leveUing  of  the  surrounding  country. 

210 


WILLIAM  COLLINS 

The  Georgian  age  was  certainly  not  as  great  poeti- 
cally as  the  ages  before  and  after  it  ;  but,  with  all 
its  artificiality  and  prosiness,  it  was  not  quite  so 
barren  as  it  used  to  be  thought,  and  Gray  and 
Collins  were  not  such  sports — though  they  w^ere 
undoubtedly  the  finest  artists  of  their  times — as 
they  used  to  be  thought.  Suppose  Collins  had 
written  this  : 

Swiftly  from  the  mountain's  brow. 
Shadows,  nurs'd  by  night,  retire  : 

And  the  peeping  sun-beam,  now, 
Paints  with  gold  the  village  spire. 

Philomel  forsakes  the  thorn. 

Plaintive  where  she  prates  at  night  ; 

And  the  Lark,  to  meet  the  morn. 
Soars  beyond  the  shepherd's  sight. 

From  the  low-roof'd  cottage  ridge, 
See  the  shatt'ring  swallow  spring  ; 

Darting  through  the  one-arch'd  bridge. 
Quick  she  dips  her  dappled  wing. 

If  Collins  had  written  that — even  though  it  be  not 
quite  so  neat  as  his  neatest — it  would  be  a  stock 
illustration  of  his  position  as  a  **  precursor  '*  of 
Wordsworth  and  the  rest  of  them.  It  is  from  John 
Cunningham's  "  Day,"  and  a  hundred  other  mid- 
eighteenth-century  poems,  examples  of  close  obser- 
vation and  fresh  feehng,  could  be  found. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  that  seems  to  me  fresher  than 
anything  in  Collins  ;    I  will  go  farther  and  say  that 

211 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Collins  does  not  seem  to  me  a  signal  example  of  a 
man  born  out  of  due  time.  On  the  contrary  he  seems 
to  me  to  have  been  on  fairly  good  terms  with  the 
eighteenth-century  conventions.  His  learning,  his 
personifications,  his  smoothness  do  not  appear  as 
things  occasional  or  things  against  which  he  was 
rebelling.  His  finest  passages,  unlike  those  in  **  The 
Song  to  David,"  do  not  read  like  passages  written 
in  another  century  ;  they  are  rather  the  perfect 
flower  of  eighteenth-century  formalism  ;  he  was  a 
genuine  poet,  but  a  poet  of  the  grave,  discreet  and 
scholarly  kind,  whose  transports  would  always  have 
been  moderate  and  who  would  always  have  inclined 
to  the  less  buoyant  measures.  It  is  a  lovely  passage 
in  the  ''  Ode  to  Evening  "  about  the  '*  hamlets 
brown  and  dim-discovered  spires  "  ;  it  shows  him 
a  true  poet,  but  not  necessarily  an  untimely  romantic; 
and  he  proceeds  at  once,  without  apparent  dis- 
comfort, to 

While  sallow  autumn  fills  thy  lap  with  leaves, 
Or  winter,  yelling  thro'  the  troublous  air, 
Affrights  thy  shrinking  train. 
And  rudely  rends  thy  robes. 

And  nobody  compelled  him  to  furnish  his  poems 
with  historical  and  linguistic  notes.  He  was,  as  a 
writer,  slightly  touched  with  frigidity,  and  it  was 
not  a  frigidity  imposed  from  outside.  There  is  cer- 
tainly no  contradiction  to  this  in  the  description  of 
him  given  by  his  first  editor,  Langhorne.  I  will 
quote  this  in  full,  as  it  seems  to  me  rather  to  con- 
firm what  I  have  been  saying  : 

212 


WILLIAM  COLLINS 

Mr.  Collins  was,  in  stature,  somewhat  above 
the  middle  size  ;  of  a  brown  complexion,  keen, 
expressive  eyes,  and  a  fixed,  sedate  aspect,  which 
from  intense  thinking,  had  contracted  an  habitual 
frown.  His  proficiency  in  letters  was  greater  than 
could  have  been  expected  from  his  years.  He  was 
skilled  in  the  learned  languages,  and  acquainted 
with  the  Italian,  French  and  Spanish.  It  is  ob- 
servable that  none  of  his  poems  bear  the  marks 
of  an  amorous  disposition,  and  that  he  is  one  of 
those  few  poets,  who  have  sailed  to  Delphi,  with- 
out touching  at  Cythera.  The  allusions  of  this 
kind  that  appear  in  his  **  Oriental  Eclogues  " 
were  indispensable  in  that  species  of  poetry ; 
and  it  is  very  remarkable  that  in  his  "  Passions," 
an  ode  for  music,  love  is  omitted,  though  it  should 
have  made  a  principal  figure  there. 

Thomson,  Warton  and  Langhorne  were  Collins 's 
poetical  friends.  They  were  all  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Warton  was  distinctly  more  "  romantic  " 
in  proclivity  than  Collins  ;  unfortunately  he  was 
not  so  good. 


213 


HERMAN  MELVILLE 

THE  reputation  of  Herman  Melville  has  had 
curious  vicissitudes.  Seventy  years  ago,  for 
a  brief  period,  he  v^^as  widely  knov^n  on  both  sides 
of  the  Atlantic.  After  '*  Moby  Dick  "  he  lapsed 
into  a  semi-obscurity  which  lasted  for  the  remain- 
ing forty  years  of  his  Ufe.  New  editions  of  his  prin- 
cipal works  came  out  at  rare  intervals  ;  now  and 
again  some  writer  peculiarly  interested  in  the  sea 
— Stevenson,  Clark  Russell,  and,  later,  Mr.  Mase- 
field — celebrated  his  genius  ;  periodic  attempts 
were  made  by  critics  who  had  come  across  him  to 
induce  a  wide  pubUc  to  read  him.  But  his  death  in 
1 891  was  almost  unnoticed,  and  for  nearly  thirty 
years  after  that  he  continued  to  be  what  he  had 
been — to  the  few  a  great  classic,  to  the  many  barely 
a  name.  And  when  I  say  the  many  I  mean  not  the 
greater  many,  but  the  many  who  are  in  the  habit  of 
reading  good  books.  Some  strange  inhibition  seems 
to  have  operated.  You  could  tell  an  intelligent  man 
about  Melville  ;  he  might  remark  that  somebody 
else  had  told  him  about  Melville  ;  and  he  would 
then  go  away  and  leave  Melville  unread.  Possibly 
Melville's  titles— "  Typee,"  "  Omoo,"  "Moby 
Dick  " — may  have  had  something  to  do  with  it.  At 
any  rate,  there  it  was.  In  191 9  Melville's  centenary 
was  celebrated  ;  that  is  to  say,  it  occurred.  The  last 
two  years  have  seen  articles,  and  good  articles,  about 
him  in  most  of  the  leading  critical  journals  ;  the 
Oxford  Press  has  reissued  "  Moby  Dick  "  precisely 
as   the   author  wrote   it  ;    and   now   an  American 

214 


HERMAN  MELVILLE 

enthusiast,  with  the  help  of  family  papers,  has  com- 
piled a  biography.  Can  we  hope  that  these  latest 
attempts  to  incorporate  Melville  in  the  list  of  authors 
with  whom  every  reading  person  must  have  some 
familiarity  will  be  more  successful  ?  Possibly  what 
seems  like  a  curse  may  still  be  in  operation  ;  but 
here  at  least  is  one  more  effort. 

Herman  Melville  was  born  in  New  York  in  1819, 
of  good  Colonial  stock.  His  maternal  grandfather 
was  a  Dutch  Revolutionary  General  ;  on  his  father's 
side  he  sprang  from  the  Scotch  Melvilles.  At  eighteen 
he  took  a  trip  to  Liverpool  and  back  as  cabin  boy 
on  a  merchantman  ;  the  experience  was  a  cruel 
one.  After  a  brief  engagement  as  a  schoolmaster 
he  went  to  sea  again,  and  lived  for  three  years  the 
life  which  was  the  substance  of  all  his  finest  works. 
He  began  with  a  w^haling  cruise  under  a  brutal 
captain.  He  deserted  in  the  Marquesas,  lived  for 
several  months  with  charming  cannibals  in  a  valley 
Uke  Eden,  escaped  (after  kilHng  a  one-eyed  chieftain 
with  a  boat-hook)  ;  went  another  cruise  and  was 
involved  in  a  mutiny  at  Tahiti  ;  spent  some  time 
in  the  French  prison  there  ;  and  wound  up  with 
two  long  cruises  in  a  United  States  frigate.  The 
details  of  his  adventures,  both  at  sea  and  in  the 
islands,  were  in  the  highest  degree  remarkable.  Evil 
fortune  persecuted  him  ;  his  character  and  his 
courage  invariably  rescued  him,  in  the  most  melo- 
dramatic way,  at  the  moment  of  extremity.  Two 
incidents  from  his  homeward  voyage  may  be  quoted. 
Through  no  fault  of  his  own,  he  omitted  to  perform 
some  duty  on  the  frigate  ;  he  was  already  lashed 
to  the  grating  for  a  flogging  when,  with  unparalleled 

215 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

but  successful  impertinence,  a  corporal  of  marines 
(who  had  never  heard  of  *'  Pinafore  ")  spoke  up  for 
him  to  the  captain  and  got  him  released.  He  was 
almost  within  sight  of  home  when  he  went  aloft  to 
reeve  the  stun '-sail  halyards.  His  jacket  was  pitched 
over  his  head,  and  he  fell  a  hundred  feet  into  the 
sea.  "  So  protracted  did  my  fall  seem,  that  I  can 
even  now  recall  the  wondering  how  much  longer  it 
would  be  ere  all  was  over,  and  I  struck."  He  thought 
himself  dead.  *'  But  of  a  sudden  some  fashionless 
form  brushed  my  side — some  inert,  coiled  fish  of 
the  sea  ;  the  thrill  of  being  alive  again  tingled  in 
my  nerves,  and  the  strong  shunning  of  death 
shocked  me  through."  He  was  picked  up,  and  in  ten 
minutes  was  sent  aloft  again  to  complete  the  un- 
completed task.  The  whole  episode  is  marvellously 
described  in  ''  White  Jacket,"  the  book  which 
secured  the  abolition  of  flogging  in  the  U.S.  Navy. 
The  end  of  this  voyage,  the  story  of  which  con- 
cludes whilst  land  is  still  out  of  sight  (''  I  love  an 
indefinite  infinite  background,  a  vast,  heaving,  roll- 
ing, mysterious  rear  "),  marks  the  end  of  Melville's 
active  life.  He  was  twenty- five.  He  married  and 
brought  up  a  family,  he  made  two  trips  to  Europe 
(writing  full  and  amusing  diaries,  which  are  re- 
printed by  Mr.  Weaver),  he  had  a  short  stimulating 
friendship  with  Hawthorne.  By  the  time  he  was 
forty  he  had  written  all  the  most  important  of  his 
books.  For  the  rest  of  his  life  he  was  externally  a 
customs  officer,  of  whom  the  world  became  in- 
creasingly oblivious,  and  his  inner  life  was  that  of 
an  imaginative  philosopher,  whose  writings  were 
scattered  with  obscure  splendours  and  speculations 

Zi6 


HERMAN  MELVILLE 

of  terrifying  sombreness.  A  few  people  knew  him 
as  a  bronzed  and  bearded  recluse  who  had  had  a 
rather  disreputably  violent  past  and  now  read  Kant 
and  Plato.  They  might  think  what  they  chose.  He 
felt  himself  to  be  growing  perpetually,  but  he  ceased 
to  be  very  much  interested  in  what  others  thought 
of  him.  ''  I  have  come  to  regard  this  matter  of  fame 
as  the  most  transparent  of  all  vanities.  I  read  Solomon 
more  and  more,  and  every  time  see  deeper  and 
deeper  and  unspeakable  meanings  in  him." 

What  could  be  more  pessimistic,  more  disillu- 
sioned ?  It  certainly  would  be  impossible  to  describe 
Melville  as  anything  but  a  pessimist.  He  habitually 
faced  the  harshest  facts  in  the  universe  ;  they  hurt 
him,  and  he  had  no  explanation  for  them.  Looking 
for  an  image  of  his  attitude  when  in  contemplation 
one  thinks  inevitably  of  the  gentle  and  meditative 
mate  Starbuck,  looking  over  the  side  of  the  "  Pequod" 
as  she  floats  over  the  silken  sunlit  Pacific,  and  think- 
ing of  the  world  of  horror  under  that  lovely  surface, 
the  perpetual  massacre,  the  vile  writhing  shapes, 
the  ruthless  rows  of  teeth.  The  whole  book — and 
**  Moby  Dick  "  is  quintessential  Melville  as  well  as 
the  crown  of  his  artistic  achievement — has  been 
resolved  into  an  allegory  of  despair.  The  mad  captain, 
Ahab,  sleeplessly  chasing  the  great  White  Whale, 
who  had  mutilated  him,  is  that  innermost  ego  to 
the  nature  and  insistence  of  which  Melville  so  often 
recurs.  The  mates,  quiet  Starbuck,  and  jovial  Stubb, 
and  commonplace  Flask,  are  the  recurrent  moods 
with  which  he  must  keep  company.  The  chase  is 
the  chase  of  life,  the  thing  hunted  an  invulnerable 
brutality  and  an  inevitable  defeat.  Again  and  again 

217 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

the  theme  is  directly  and  openly  returned  to  ;  the 
eternal  problem  of  evil  is  posed  in  all  its  manifesta- 
tions ;  sentences  and  pages  are  written  which 
momentarily  open  black  abysses  of  despair  or  pre- 
sent to  the  mind  with  irresistible  force  pictures  of 
nightmare  horror.  No  writer  could  more  powerfully 
convey  such  pictures  to  the  imagination  ;  none 
has  exceeded  Melville  in  the  gift  of  using  a  single 
word  or  phrase  which  stabs  the  heart  and  leaves  it 
throbbing  with  dread.  Whenever  Moby  Dick  is 
seen  he  seems  *'  the  gliding  great  demon  of  the  seas 
of  Ufe."  Ahab,  momentarily  softening  to  the  poor 
black  boy,  Pip,  speaks  to  him  of  "  omniscient  gods 
oblivious  of  suffering  man  ;  and  man,  though  idiotic, 
and  knowing  not  what  he  does,  yet  full  of  the  sweet 
things  of  love  and  gratitude."  Consider,  says  the 
author,  the  eternal  wars  of  the  sea  : 

Consider  all  this  ;  and  then  turn  to  this  green, 
gentle,  and  most  docile  earth  ;  consider  them 
both,  the  sea  and  the  land  ;  and  do  you  not  find 
a  strange  analogy  to  something  in  yourself  ?  For 
as  this  appalling  ocean  surrounds  the  verdant 
land,  so  in  the  soul  of  man  there  lies  one  insular 
Tahiti,  full  of  peace  and  joy,  but  encompassed 
by  all  the  horrors  of  the  half- known  life.  God 
keep  thee  !  Push  not  oif  from  that  isle,  thou  canst 
never  return. 

Melville  himself  pushed  off  ;  at  least  in  the  sense 
that  he  became  lost  in  speculation.  Perhaps  it  was 
inevitable,  as  Miss  Meynell  suggests  in  her  excellent 
little  introduction  to  the  new  edition,  that  this  should 

218 


HERMAN  MELVILLE 

happen  to  the  author  of  **  Moby  Dick."  There  are 
depths  so  great  that  if  the  diver  reaches  them  he 
sinks  to  return  no  more.  But  in  "  Moby  Dick  " 
itself,  the  struggles  of  the  intellect  with  the  enigma 
are  not  yet  out  of  the  control  of  the  artist  ;  more- 
over, one  is  liable  to  give  a  false  impression  in  saying 
that  the  book  is  pessimistic.  It  has  nothing  in  common 
with  the  grey  miseries  of  the  enfeebled.  Its  darkest 
passages  are  passionate  in  the  writing  and  produce 
an  exhilaration  in  the  reader  ;  both  the  glory  as 
well  as  the  awfulness  of  life  are  celebrated  at  white 
heat  ;  and  the  moods  of  the  book  are  as  varied  as 
the  *'  Pequod's  "  crew.  The  jovial  Stubb  and  the 
matter-of-fact  Flask  get  their  turns  with  Starbuck 
and  the  captain.  Every  variety  of  marine  experience, 
all  the  beauty  and  terror  of  the  South  Seas,  a  world 
of  human  character  and  lively  external  incident,  are 
here.  At  one  moment  we  are  watching  a  bloody  fight 
on  deck,  at  another  listening  to  a  story  in  a  cafe  at 
Lima,  at  another  boiUng  down  whale-blubber  in 
the  fire-lit  night  ;  there  are  enough  battles  and 
storms  and  encounters  to  make  a  dozen  books  for 
boys.  Not  only  does  one  feel  that  there  w^as  a  Conrad 
and  a  Stevenson  in  Melville,  but  frequently  one  is 
forcibly  reminded,  in  chapters  at  a  time,  of  Dickens 
and  Defoe.  How  could  a  book  open  more  briskly 
and  humorously  and  excitingly  ?  In  what  novel  can 
one  find  a  record  of  fact  so  elaborate,  a  collection  of 
odd  learning  so  amusing  and  peculiar,  as  in  that 
large  section  of  the  book  which  describes  the  whole 
history,  structure,  and  fate  of  the  whale,  and  epito- 
mises the  manners  and  customs  of  whalers  ? 

Melville's  laugh  is  as  loud  as  his  brooding  is  deep, 

219 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

and  no  recorder  of  the  surface  of  life  ever  had  a 
keener  eye  for  every  kind  of  detail  or  a  more  retentive 
memory.  And  the  whole  wealth  of  his  passion  and 
knowledge,  humour  and  suffering  is  poured  out  in 
language  which  is  at  its  best  unsurpassed,  and  in  a 
curious  mixed  form — plain  narrative  is  broken  up 
by  essays,  treatises,  dramatic  dialogues — which 
superbly  justifies  itself. 

He  lapsed  sometimes  into  excesses  of  rhetoric  ; 
his  love  for  Sir  Thomas  Browne  sometimes  be- 
trayed him  ;  but  he  equalled  Browne's  sentences 
and  De  Quincey's  apostrophes  when  he  was  think- 
ing of  neither,  and  none  of  his  numerous  South  Sea 
successors  has  approached  him  in  the  power  of 
natural  description.  "  I  will  add,"  he  says,  when 
discussing  ropes,  "  that  Manilla  is  much  more  hand- 
some and  becoming  to  the  boat  than  Hemp.  Hemp 
is  a  dusky,  dark  fellow,  a  sort  of  Indian  ;  but  Manilla 
is  a  golden-haired  Circassian  to  behold."  '*  For," 
he  says  in  parentheses,  "  there  is  an  aesthetics  in  all 
things."  That  there  was  to  him,  that  he  was  a  born 
poet,  is  evident  everywhere — except  sometimes  in 
his  poetry.  Imagery  pours  out  of  him,  and  every- 
thing he  mentions  is  touched  with  light.  I  should 
like  to  reprint  the  whole  marvellous  chapter  on 
**  The  Whiteness  of  the  Whale  "  ;  I  can  only  quote 
a  few  poor  sentences  to  illustrate  his  qualities  : 

The  subterranean  miner  that  works  in  us  all, 
how  can  one  tell  whither  leads  his  shaft  by  the 
ever-shifting,  muffled  sound  of  his  pick  .? 

Few  are  the  foreheads,  which,  like  Shakespeare's 
or  Ivlelanchthon's,  rise  so  high,  and  descend  so 

220 


HERMAN  MELVILLE 

low,  that  the  eyes  themselves  seem  clear,  eternal, 
tideless  mountain  lakes  ;  and  all  above  them,  in 
the  forehead's  wrinkles,  you  seem  to  track  the 
antlered  thoughts  descending  there  to  drink,  as  the 
Highland  hunters  track  the  snowprints  of  the  deer. 

To  any  meditative  Magian  rover,  this  serene 
Pacific,  once  beheld,  must  ever  after  be  the  sea 
of  his  adoption.  It  rolls  the  midmost  waters  of  the 
world,  the  Indian  Ocean  and  Atlantic  being  but 
its  arms.  The  same  waves  wash  the  moles  of  the 
new-built  Californian  towns,  but  yesterday  planted 
by  the  recentest  race  of  men,  and  lave  the  faded 
but  still  gorgeous  skirts  of  Asiatic  lands,  older 
than  Abraham  ;  while  all  between  float  milky- 
ways  of  coral  isles,  and  low-lying,  endless,  un- 
known archipelagoes,  and  impenetrable  Japans. 
Thus  this  mysterious,  divine  Pacific  zones  the 
world's  whole  bulk  about  ;  makes  all  coasts  one 
bay  to  it  ;  seems  the  tide-beating  heart  of  earth. 
Lifted  by  these  eternal  swells,  you  needs  must 
own  the  seductive  god,  bowing  your  head  to  Pan. 

But  few  thoughts  of  Pan  stirred  Ahab's  brain, 
as  standing  like  an  iron  statue  at  his  accustomed 
place  beside  the  mizzen  rigging,  with  one  nostril 
he  unthinkingly  snuffed  the  sugary  musk  from 
the  Bashee  isles  (in  whose  sweet  woods  mild 
lovers  must  be  walking),  and  with  the  other  con- 
sciously inhaled  the  salt  breath  of  the  new-found 
sea  ;  that  sea  in  which  the  hated  White  Whale 
must  even  then  be  swimming.  Launched  at  length 
upon  these  almost  final  waters,  and  gliding  to- 
wards   the    Japanese    cruising-ground,    the    old 

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man's  purpose  intensified  itself.  His  firm  lips  met 
like  the  lips  of  a  vice  ;  the  Delta  of  his  forehead's 
veins  swelled  like  overladen  brooks  ;  in  his  very- 
sleep,  his  ringing  cry  ran  through  the  vaulted 
hull,  "  Stern  all  !  the  White  Whale  spouts  thick 
blood  !  " 

There  have  been  more  profuse  great  v^riters  than 
Melville,  and,  as  some  may  think,  wiser  men  ;  but 
I  do  not  believe  that  there  exists  a  greater  work  of 
prose  fiction  in  English  than  "  Moby  Dick." 


222 


STOCK  PHRASES 

MR.  A.  M.  HYAMSON  is  known  to  amateurs 
of  lexicography  as  the  compiler  of  an  ex- 
tremely useful  small  "  Dictionary  of  Universal 
Biography."  His  latest  work,  A  Dictionary  of  English 
Phrases^  should  be  equally  useful.  Much  of  the  in- 
formation he  gives  will  be  found  in  existing  dic- 
tionaries of  quotations  and  of  "  Phrase  and  Fable," 
but  he  has  w^orked  on  a  rather  eclectic  plan  of  his 
own  with  a  view  to  providing  a  complement  to  the 
ordinary  verbal  dictionary.  He  himself  says  that  he 
has  included,  besides  '*  phrases  proper,"  "  phrase- 
ological and  historical  allusions,"  *'  catchwords  " 
(political  and  other),  "  stereotyped  modes  of  speech," 
"  metaphorical  chches,"  *'  corrupted  words,"  *'  nick- 
names and  sobriquets,"  "  derivations  from  per- 
sonal names,"  "  quotations  that  have  become  part 
of  the  language,"  "  war  words,"  etc.  It  is  a  curious 
company  ;  but  I  think  that  experience  will  prove 
that  Mr.  Hyamson's  method  justifies  itself. 

A  large  part  of  any  such  work  must  be  devoted 
to  telling  the  instructed  reader  what  he  knows 
already.  You  cannot  compile  dictionaries  with  a 
single  eye  on  those  who  least  need  them.  Many  of 
us  may  not  need  to  be  told  the  meaning  and  origin 
of  Gordian  Knot,  Rump  ParHament,  Gradgrind, 
Procrustean  Bed,  or  the  Seven  Ages  of  Man.  A  very 
large  number  of  the  purchasers  of  this  book  will 
probably  never  have  need  to  refer  to 

Goth,  A  :    a  barbarian  ;    one  heedless  of  the 
claims  of  the  arts  and  sciences.  After  the  people 

223 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

that  overran  and  devastated  the  Roman  Empire 
in  the  third  and  fifth  centuries. 

Yet  he  would  be  a  very  learned  man  who  should 
find  any  page  on  which  there  was  no  information 
which  was  novel  to  him  ;  and  I  myself,  not  having 
an  entire  issue  of  this  journal  at  my  disposal,  can 
only  give  a  few  specimens  to  indicate  the  sort  of 
material  which  Mr.  Hyamson  supplies. 

Oddly,  the  very  first  phrase  which  caught  my  eye 
when  I  opened  the  book  was  one  which  comes  from 
a  source  that  I  had  not  dreamed  of  suspecting.  *'  Not 
worth  a  twopenny  damn  "  is  the  phrase  ;  it  looks 
too  simple  to  invite  curiosity  ;  but  according  to 
our  present  authority  it  derives  from  the  fact  that 
there  was  *'  an  Indian  coin,  a  dam,  which  much 
depreciated  in  value."  Opposite  it  I  noticed  "  uncle'* 
as  used  of  a  pawnbroker.  It  comes,  apparently,  from 
the  Latin  uncus,  a  hook  on  which  pledges  used  to 
be  hung.  There  is  no  mistaking  the  meaning  of 
*'  The  Great  Unwashed,"  which  appears  just  below 
"  Uncle,"  but  a  very  small  fraction  of  those  who 
employ  this  offensive  designation  will  know  that  it 
was  first  used  by  Edmund  Burke.  ''  Go  to  Bath  " 
is  said  to  be  in  allusion  to  the  popularity  of  Bath  as 
a  place  for  the  treatment  of  lunatics  ;  but  "  Go  to 
Jericho  "  is  disputed.  Some  will  derive  it  from  the 
fact  that  Henry  VIII  used  a  country  place  called 
Jericho  as  a  retreat  ;  others  from  King  David's 
order  to  certain  people  to  go  to  Jericho  until  their 
beards  were  grown.  King  David  :  "as  drunk  as 
David's  sow."  Looking  that  up  I  find  it  amidst 
"  drunk    as    a    cobbler,"   "  drunk   as  a   fiddler," 

224 


STOCK  PHRASES 

*'  drunk  as  a  lord,"  "  drunk  as  a  pope,"  "  drunk  as 
the  devil,"  and  "  drunk  as  a  tinker  at  Banbury."  It 
is  alleged  that  there  was  a  man  David  Lloyd,  of 
Hereford,  whose  wife  was  found  drunk  in  a  pig- 
stye  when  he  took  a  party  to  see  a  sow  he  owned. 
It  isn't  very  convincing,  but  nothing  better  offers. 
"  To  let  the  cat  out  of  the  bag  "  is  attributed  to  a 
custom  of  seUing  cats  in  bags,  falsely  representing 
the  same  to  be  sucking-pigs. 

The  "  Ashes  "  (cricketing)  have  been  satisfactorily 
run  down  to  the  Sporting  Times  of  1882.  Of ''  chaff," 
meaning  banter,  three  explanations  are  offered,  one 
of  which  is  that  there  was 

a  custom  in  the  North  Midlands  of  emptying  a 
sack  of  chaff  at  the  door  of  a  man  who  ill-treats 
his  wife,  to  indicate  that  thrashing  is  done  there. 

"  Chestnut  "  (an  old  joke)  is  variously  attributed  ; 
I  am  surprised  to  find  it  so  modern  that  it  can 
plausibly  be  traced  to  a  story  of  a  chestnut  farm  too 
frequently  told  by  E.  A.  Abbey,  the  painter,  who 
died  as  recently  as  191 1.  **  To  face  the  music  "  has 
no  fewer  than  four  suggested  derivations  : 

From  (i)  the  actor,  who  in  facing  the  music 
faces  his  public,  his  critics  ;  (2)  the  difhculty  in 
training  army  horses  to  remain  quiet  in  the  com- 
pany of  a  regimental  band  ;  (3)  the  drumming 
out  of  men  dismissed  by  the  U.S.  army  ;  (4)  the 
muster  of  militia-men  who  are  drawn  up  in  ranks 
facing  the  band. 

You  take  your  choice  ;  but  with  such  uncertainty 
one  feels  that  the  genuine  original  context  may  have 

225  Q 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

been  none  of  these.  The  mention  of  the  actor  facing 
his  public  sends  me  in  search  of  another  phrase.  It 
is  here,  but  only  in  the  form  of  "To  get  the  big 
bird  "  ;  Mr.  Hyamson  should  note  ''  to  get  the 
bird  "  as  the  commoner  variant.  Amongst  terms 
which  are  less  commonly  used  than  they  might  be, 
I  notice  *'  Albino  Poets,"  which  was  used  by  Wendell 
Holmes  of  the  sicklier  kind  of  bards. 

It  is  inconceivable  that  such  a  collection  should 
be  complete,  or  that  a  collection  in  one  volume 
should  not  frequently  disappoint  the  reader.  Granted 
that  it  contains  any  considerable  amount  of  in- 
formation which  is  new  to  one  and  not  easily  acces- 
sible elsewhere,  one  ought  to  be  grateful  for  it.  I 
certainly,  to  use  a  phrase  which,  as  I  now  learn, 
derives  from  He3rwood's  "  Proverbes  "  (1546),  will 
not  look  the  gift-horse  in  the  mouth.  Mr.  Hyamson 
himself,  in  fact,  disarms  criticism  in  his  very  modest 
preface.  He  does  not  profess  to  be  able  exactly  to 
define  the  scope  of  his  book  ;  he  seems  to  have  been 
guided  as  much  by  intuition  as  by  reason.  He  says 
that  critics  who  point  out  deficiencies  will  seldom 
lack  justification,  and  he  asks  for  suggestions  for 
additional  entries.  For  myself,  I  think  that  it  would 
be  worth  his  while  to  pay  rather  more  attention  to 
slang,  and  especially  to  well-established  American 
slang,  which  is  in  continual  process  of  naturalisation 
here.  He  has  plenty  of  mid- Victorian  words  and 
phrases  which  came  from  America  :  '*  carpet- 
bagger," ''  bunkum,"  *'  bark  up  the  wrong  tree," 
and  hundreds  of  others.  But  if  he  went  freely  about 
London  with  his  ears  pricked  up  (Virgil's  "  Aeneid 
I."  and  Chapman's  "All  Poole's  Day"),  he  would 

226 


STOCK  PHRASES 

certainly  encounter  many  more  recent  immigrants. 
We  may  never  adopt  the  admirable  word  "  copper- 
throat,"  for  we  are  already  so  well-stocked  with 
terms  descriptive  of  drinking  propensities.  Possibly 
"  rubber-neck,"  also,  dear  to  all  students  of  O. 
Henry,  who  reduced  it  to  ''  rube,"  may  fail  to  get  a 
home  here.  But  ''  beat  it "  is  coming,  **  beat  the 
band  "  is  already  popular,  and  ''to  go  on  the  water- 
wagon  "  (briefly,  on  the  wagon)  may  be  heard  almost 
anywhere.  Mr.  Hyamson  would  find  it  easy  to  make 
room  for  many  additions  if  he  could  bring  himself 
— though  the  process  must  be  distressing  to  any 
dictionary-maker — to  leave  out  some  of  the  phrases 
he  has  now  thought  fit  to  include.  Some  of  the 
solemner  nicknames  might  go.  It  is  quite  right  that 
we  should  be  told  that  "  The  British  Solomon  " 
was  James  I  ;  the  phrase  has  long  been  widely 
current,  and  is  often  used  without  explanation  in 
the  context.  But  it  is  hardly  worth  while  to  record 
the  fact  that  a  forgotten  painter  was  at  one  time 
known  as  "  the  English  Salvator  Rosa."  There  are 
other  words — "  uppertendom  "  is  an  instance — 
which  are  merely  awkw^ard  attempts  at  coinage 
which  have  definitely  failed.  And  the  words  made 
from  proper  names  might  be  diminished.  I  see 
''  Beardsleyism  "  here,  defined  as  : 

A  pictorial  illustration  in  black-and-white  in 
the  style  of  Aubrey  Vincent  Beardsley. 

The  word  has  doubtless  been  used,  but  it  is  unlikely 
to  be  used  if  or  when  Beardsley  has  been  forgotten. 
Anybody  can  make  that  sort  of  word  at  any  moment ; 

227 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

it  defines  itself.  We  are  quite  likely  to  see  Lloyd- 
Georgism,  Carsonism,  Byronism,  Conradism,  Wil- 
sonism,  and  many  other  such  in  the  papers  to- 
morrow morning. 

These  are  small  suggestions.  I  turn  from  the 
book  with  a  certain  melancholy.  Why  ?  Because  of 
the  number  of  fine  phrases  it  contains  which  we 
use  daily  and  the  fineness  of  which  we  never  realise. 
It  is  a  cemetery  of  dead  metaphors  ;  these  were 
lovely  and  pleasant  in  their  lives,  and  in  death  they 
are  put  into  dictionaries.  Surely  the  reflection  is  a 
little  saddening.  A  man  may  make  an  image  which 
is  of  local  application  or  a  little  above  the  heads  of 
mankind,  and  it  will  retain  its  freshness  in  per- 
petuity. Let  him  do  the  best  thing  of  all — make  an 
image  which  is  widely  applicable  and  plain  to  the 
common  understanding — and  his  beautiful  creation 
will  be  killed  by  too  much  handling.  What  an  agree- 
able shock  of  surprise  must  have  been  felt  by  those 
who  were  first  told  by  an  imaginative  man  that  they 
were  looking  for  a  needle  in  a  bundle  of  hay  !  With 
us  familiarity  has  bred  blindness  ;  we  drop  the  phrase 
out  without  seeing  any  needle  or  any  hay.  "  To 
build  on  the  sand,"  "  to  beat  the  air,"  "  to  sponge," 
**  to  split  hairs,"  *'  to  feather  one's  nest  " — there 
are  a  thousand  of  them  in  this  book.  They  have 
become  so  worn  by  usage  that  we  might  almost  as 
well  be  without  them  ;  they  are  said  to  ''  enrich 
the  language,"  but  the  only  person  who  really  gets 
full  enjoyment  out  of  this  opulence  is  a  foreigner 
who  learns  English.  Every  great  writer  contributes 
to  the  stock  ;  his  very  best  phrases  are  withdrawn 
from  him  and  turned  into  half-obliterated  currency. 

228 


STOCK  PHRASES 

And  for  us  there  comes  ready  to  our  tongue  a  stock 
description  of  every  situation  and  a  stock  com- 
parison for  every  quality.  "  Straight — as  a  die," 
"  Old— as  the  hills,"  ''  Soft— as  a  peach,"  "  Rain- 
ing— like  cats  and  dogs,"  ''  Dark — as  pitch  "  ;  half 
the  epithets  we  have  bring  their  little  withered  tails 
behind  them  with  scarcely  a  wag  left  in  them.  '*  A 
Dictionary  of  English  Phrases  "  is  an  immense 
mausoleum  full  of  the  mummies  of  Samsons,  and 
Helens,  and  Cleopatras. 


229 


THE  LAUREATES 

MR.  E.  K.  BROADUS'S  scholarly  and  amus- 
ing book,  The  Poets  Laureate  in  England^ 
contains  a  study  of  the  origins  of  the  laureateship,  a 
history  of  its  development  as  a  regular  institution, 
sketches  of  the  lives  of  the  Laureates,  and  accounts 
of  their  work,  whether  commanded  or  spontaneous, 
as  political  poets,  in  the  broad  sense  of  the  word. 

Before  scientific  history  began,  respectable  authors 
thought  nothing  of  making  the  confident  assertion 
that  the  University  of  Cambridge  was  founded  by 
Cantaber  of  Spain,  4,321  years  after  the  Creation, 
or  by  King  Arthur  ;  that  the  University  of  Oxford 
owed  its  origin  to  King  Alfred  ;  and  that  the  prime 
founder  of  the  British  Kingdom  was  a  refugee  from 
Troy.  To  a  generation  unfamiliar  with  documents, 
impatient  of  exact  research,  and  fond  (as  all  healthy 
people  are)  of  the  picturesque,  there  was  nothing 
unnatural  in  the  neat  pedigrees  of  the  Laureateship 
produced  by  the  antiquaries  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  In  Dryden's  patent,  "  Sir  Geoffrey  Chaucer, 
Knight,"  "  Sir  John  Gower,  Knight,"  and  "  Benja- 
min Jonson,  Esquire,"  were  all  specifically  mentioned 
as  having  fully  and  amply  enjoyed  "  the  rights, 
privileges,  benefits,  and  advantages  thereunto  be- 
longing "  in  the  time  of  *'  our  Royall  Progenitors." 
Where  supposed  experts  were  so  dogmatic,  it  was 
not  strange  that  laymen  should  take  the  antique 
lineage  of  the  Laureateship  on  trust.  These  poets 
and  others  had  received  pensions  and  liquor  from 
the  Crown,  and  some  of  them  were  called  poets 

230 


THE  LAUREATES 

laureate.  But  the  pensions — notably  Chaucer's — 
had  not  always  any  obvious  connection  with  their 
poetry  ;  the  title  was  a  mere  degree  given  by  the 
Universities  ;  and  there  was  no  question  of  a  regular 
Post  in  the  Household  to  which  these  men  were 
appointed.  Their  positions  varied.  Spenser  received 
money  from  Ehzabeth,  but  his  contact  with  her  was 
of  the  slenderest.  Ben  Jonson  was  pensioned  over  a 
long  period  of  years  by  two  monarchs  and  supplied 
many  Court  Masques  in  return  for  the  favour.  It 
was  not  until  the  nomination  of  Dryden  that  the 
Laureateship  was  recognised  as  a  definite  salaried 
office  which  ought  to  be  filled.  Nevertheless,  I  feel 
that  Professor  Broadus  is  a  little  rigid  in  his  insist- 
ence on  the  fact.  Most  of  our  institutions  have 
shadowy  beginnings,  and  the  development  of  the 
Laureateship  may  be  regarded  as  analogous  to  that 
of  the  Peerage,  Parliament,  and  the  Power  of  the 
Purse.  And  at  least  I  think  we  ought  to  shift  the  birth 
of  the  regular  office  back  to  Davenant  ;  Davenant 
may  not  have  had  a  patent,  but  the  fact  that  when 
he  died  Dryden  w^as  in  terms  mentioned  as  his  suc- 
cessor shows  that  he  was  already  considered  to  be 
holding  an  office,  even  if  his  status  was  only  posthu- 
mously recognised  on  paper. 

After  the  date  of  Dryden 's  appointment,  Pro- 
fessor Broadus  distinguishes  three  clearly  marked 
epochs.  Until  the  Georges  came,  the  Laureates, 
though  any  political  writing  they  might  do  was 
appreciated,  were  not  expected  to  compose  par- 
ticular poems  on  particular  dates.  Dryden  may  have 
been  moved  to  write  four  great  poems  by  virtue  of 
his  official  position,  but  he  was  not  asked  for  New 

231 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Year  Odes,  and  Tate,  though  proUfic  in  these  com- 
positions, committed  them  voluntarily.  It  was  with 
the  appointment  of  Nicholas  Rowe,  in  171 5,  that 
the  stated  duties  began.  Until  George  I  IPs  time, 
the  Laureate  was  compelled  to  furnish  annually  a 
New  Year's  Ode  and  a  Birthday  Ode,  to  be  sung  be- 
fore the  King  by  royal  musicians  in  the  Chapel 
Royal.  Pope  maliciously  referred  to  Gibber's  Odes 
as  being 

made  by  the  poet  Laureate  for  the  time  being,  to 
be  sung  at  Court  on  every  New  Year's  Day,  the 
words  of  which  are  happily  drowned  by  the  in- 
struments. 

Whitehead,  himself  Laureate,  wrote  a  very  frank 
'*  Pathetic  Apology  for  all  Laureates,"  in  which  he 
said  : 

His  Muse,  obliged  by  sack  and  pension 

Without  a  subject  or  invention, 

Must  certain  words  in  order  set 

As  innocent  as  a  Gazette  .... 

Content  with  Boyce's  harmony. 

Who  throws  on  many  a  worthless  lay 

His  music  and  his  powers  away. 

He,  a  patient  and  a  sensible  man,  sometimes  managed 
to  combine  a  humane  and  eloquent  passage  in  an 
official  poem,  but  more  often  produced  verses  which 
deserved  his  own  candid  description  ;  the  only  men 
who  were  probably  comfortable  with  the  job  were 
the  obscure  Eusden  and  the  worthless  Pye.  A  typical 

232 


THE  LAUREATES 

passage  is  Colley  Gibber's  panegyric  on  the  off- 
spring of  George  II  : 

Around  the  royal  table  spread, 
See  how  the  beauteous  branches  shine  ! 

Sprung  from  the  fertile  genial  bed 
Of  glorious  George  and  Caroline. 

The  task  was  usually  unpalatable  ;  one  offer  made 
in  the  middle  of  the  century  was  coupled  with  an 
assurance  that  Odes  would  not  be  insisted  upon. 
But  the  offer  was  decHned,  and  the  obligation  con- 
tinued until  George  IV  released  Southey,  who  had 
insisted  when  he  was  "  inducted  into  all  the  rights, 
privileges  and  benefits  which  Henry  James  Pye, 
Esq.,  did  enjoy,"  that  he  wished  that  "  upon  great 
public  events  I  might  either  write  or  be  silent  as 
the  spirit  moved,"  and  had  only  under  protest  sup- 
plied (not  for  publication)  Odes  for  a  few  birthdays 
of  the  old  mad  Wind  George  III. 

Then  began  the  third  period.  Since  then  the 
Laureate  has  been  free  '*  to  write  or  be  silent."  Mr. 
Broadus  rightly  says  that  Tennyson  was  a  national 
spokesman  as  no  previous  Laureate  has  been,  and 
he  calls  attention  to  the  fact,  too  often  ignored,  that 
during  the  late  war  the  present  Laureate  produced 
a  series  of  poems  "  of  memorable  quality  and  sub- 
stantial length."  "  It  is  not,"  he  says,  "  the  ephemeral 
impulses  of  the  war  which  find  expression  in  Mr. 
Bridges'  pages,  but  rather  the  greater  emotions — 
the  emotions  which  will  still  emerge  as  the  per- 
spective lengthens,  and  will  sum  up  all  the  rest." 
'*  Throughout  the  war,  and  since  the  war  was  won, 

233 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Mr.  Bridges  has  performed  a  service  to  which  this 
history  affords  no  parallel." 

Is  the  Laureateship  worth  having  ?  Professor 
Broadus's  book  gives  emphatic  support  to  the  view 
that  ''  command  "  poems  are,  as  a  rule,  likely  to  be 
bad.  Even  the  ablest  and  most  patriotic  of  genuine 
poets  will  probably  produce  a  frigid  and  hollow- 
sounding  composition  if  he  be  ordered  to  celebrate 
a  nation,  a  hero,  or  a  cause  on  a  particular  date.  But 
this  is  not,  as  it  has  so  often  been  supposed  to  be, 
sufficient  ground  for  a  condemnation  of  the  Laureate- 
ship  as  an  institution.  Those  who  make  it  so  are 
cherishing  a  misconception  of  the  historical  facts. 
It  was  always  supposed  that  an  official  Laureate 
would  occasionally  derive  inspiration  from  national 
history  and  political  events  ;  and  there  is  sense  in 
the  assumption  that  a  man  publicly  called  to  the 
position  of  national  poet  will  find  his  thoughts  turn- 
ing more  often  than  they  might,  in  other  circum- 
stances, turn  to  those  themes,  and  might  more  often 
be  moved  to  genuine  poetical  utterance  concerning 
them.  The  disciplined  Poet  Laureate,  the  bard 
working  to  a  schedule,  is  another  matter  ;  and  he 
has  never  existed  in  this  country  except  during  the 
one  Hanoverian  century.  He  appeared  and  dis- 
appeared with  the  powdered  wig,  and  it  is  incon- 
ceivable that  he  should  come  again.  A  Laureateship 
without  set  duties  is  not,  as  is  so  generally  assumed, 
an  obsolete  survival  ;  it  is  precisely  the  Laureate- 
ship  which  was  originally  established.  One  common 
error  is  evident  here  ;  another  Ues  in  the  equally 
frequent  statement  that  appointments  to  the 
Laureateship  have  nearly  always  been  bad. 

234 


THE  LAUREATES 

They  have  not.  Excepting  in  the  eighteenth 
century  they  have  usually  been  very  good.  We  may, 
with  Professor  Broadus,  rule  out  Chaucer,  Skelton, 
and  Jonson  as  not  being  in  the  true  Laureate  sequence: 
but  the  rest  are  a  very  creditable  Hst.  When  Dryden 
was  appointed  there  was  one  greater  poet  living, 
but  even  the  most  tolerant  of  restored  Stuarts  could 
scarcely  have  been  expected  to  select  John  Milton, 
whose  head,  in  1660,  had  narrowly  escaped  being 
stuck  upon  Temple  Bar  to  rot  with  those  of  the 
regicides.  In  1688  there  was  nothing  better  avail- 
able than  Shadwell,  who  received  the  appointment, 
and  whose  work,  after  all,  still  in  a  manner  lives. 
Nahum  Tate,  who  followed  shortly  after,  was 
certainly  not  a  very  eminent  man,  though  he  con- 
tributed one  classic  to  the  language,  the  carol, 
"  While  Shepherds  Watched  their  Flocks  by  Night." 
But,  in  the  political  circumstances,  nothing  better 
could  have  been  done.  The  Georgian  era  undeniably 
saw  a  slump  both  in  poetry  and  in  Laureates.  Yet  it 
is  worth  remarking  that  even  in  the  worst  age  of 
official  taste  the  Laureateship  was  offered  to  the 
greatest  poet  of  that  age.  Gray  refused.  That  he 
should  wear  the  mantle  just  relinquished  by  Gibber 
was  a  little  too  much  to  ask  ;  and  he  was  a  recluse. 
His  own  account  of  his  refusal  was  characteristic  : 

Though  I  very  well  know  the  bland,  emolHent, 
saponaceous  qualities  both  of  sack  and  silver,  yet 
if  any  great  man  would  say  to  me,  *'  I  make 
you  rat-catcher  to  His  Majesty,  with  a  salary  of 
j(^300  a  year  and  two  butts  of  the  best  Malaga  ; 
and  though  it  has  been  usual  to  catch  a  mouse  or 

235 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

two,  for  form's  sake,  in  public  once  a  year,  yet  to 
you,  sir,  we  shall  not  stand  upon  these  things,"  I 
cannot  say  I  should  jump  at  it  ;  nay,  if  they  would 
drop  the  very  name  of  the  office  and  call  me  Sine- 
cure to  the  King's  Majesty,  I  should  still  feel  a 
little  awkward,  and  think  everybody  I  saw  smelt 
a  rat  about  me  ;  but  I  do  not  pretend  to  blame 
anyone  else  that  has  not  the  same  sensations  ;  for 
my  part  I  would  rather  be  sergeant-trumpeter  or 
pinmaker  to  the  palace.  Nevertheless,  I  interest 
myself  a  little  in  the  history  of  it,  and  rather  wish 
somebody  may  accept  it  that  will  retrieve  the 
credit  of  the  thing,  if  it  be  retrievable,  or  ever  had 
any  credit. 

Whitehead,  who  received  the  reversion,  was  hardly 
great  enough  to  *'  retrieve  the  credit  of  the  thing," 
but  there  was  no  one  much  better  in  a  time  when 
graceful  small  poets  were  common  and  great  poets 
not  to  be  found.  Warton,  his  successor,  was  also  a 
good — and  an  unexpected — choice,  considering  the 
material  available.  When  Pye  died,  in  1813,  Sir 
Walter  Scott  was  offered  the  Laureateship  and 
declined  it  ;  Southey,  not  a  mean  figure,  however 
poorly  he  may  compare  in  our  eyes  with  two  poets 
then  writing,  accepted  it,  and  began  the  restoration 
of  credit.  In  the  last  eighty  years  there  have  been 
four  Laureates,  of  whom  one  was  a  statesman's 
practical  joke,  and  the  other  three  were  Words- 
worth, Tennyson,  and  Robert  Bridges.  No  doubt 
many  good  nineteenth-century  poets  did  not  hold 
the  Laureateship.  You  cannot  kill  a  Laureate  a 
year  in  order  to  prove  your  ability  to  choose  his 

236 


THE  LAUREATES 

successor ;  if  Tennyson  was  Poet  Laureate,  Browning 
and  Matthew  Arnold  could  never  be  Poets  Laureate, 
since  the  office  is  held  for  life.  This  point  is  often 
overlooked  ;  the  truth  is  that  as  a  rule  the  appoint- 
ments have  been  made  very  well. 

So  why  not  go  on  making  them  ?  It  would  be 
pointless  to  exaggerate  the  advantages  of  the  thing. 
Let  us  say  no  more  than  that  any  contact  between 
the  State  and  good  literature  is  to  be  welcomed, 
and  that  the  Laureateship  has  led  to  the  enrich- 
ment of  our  literature  by  a  few  good  poems.  Yet  we 
need  not  even  go  so  far  as  that  to  justify  a  con- 
tinuance of  the  office.  If  no  more  could  be  said  for 
it  than  that  it  will  generally,  or  even  occasionally, 
give  an  advertisement  to  a  meritorious  poet,  and 
that  it  is  an  ancient  and  innocuous  part  of  our  national 
system,  it  would  be  worth  preserving.  So  many  old 
things  compel  their  own  abolition  by  becoming 
positive  obstructions,  abuses,  and  nuisances,  that 
we  should  feel  especially  tender  about  the  old  things 
that  do  no  harm. 

Let  the  Laureateship  remain  ;  and  let  the  butt  of 
sack  be  restored.  The  student  of  Professor  Broadus's 
book  will  find  that  from  the  earliest  days  all  our 
Court  poets  and  Poets  Laureate  were  paid  partly 
in  wine.  He  will  also  find,  and  he  ought  not  to  be 
surprised  to  find,  that  when  the  grant  of  a  butt  of 
wine  was  commuted  for  a  small  additional  grant 
of  money,  the  change  was  made  at  the  request  of 
the  egregious  Pye,  at  once  the  most  avaricious,  the 
most  abstemious,  and  the  most  illiterate  of  all  those 
who  have  worn  the  British  laurel.  In  so  doing  he 
cheated  all  his  successors.  For  a  thrifty  government 

237 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

conveniently  forgot  to  pay  them  the  ^26  in  lieu  of 
wine,  pretending  that  the  sum  was  included  in  the 
;f  100  which  had  always  been  paid,  and  which  con- 
tinued to  be  paid.  As  Southey  wrote  pathetically  to 
Walter  Scott  : 

The  butt  of  sack  is  now  wickedly  commuted 
to  5^26  ;  which  said  sum,  unlike  the  canary,  is 
subject  to  income-tax,  land-tax,  and  heaven  knows 
what  beside.  The  whole  net  income  is  little  more 
or  less  than  £()o. 

Scott  replied  : 

Is  there  no  getting  rid  of  that  iniquitous  modus ^ 
and  requiring  the  butt  in  kind  ?  I  would  have 
you  think  of  it  ;  I  know  no  man  so  well  entitled 
to  Xeres  sack  as  yourself,  though  many  bards 
would  make  a  better  figure  at  drinking  it.  I  should 
think  that  in  due  time  a  memorial  might  get  some 
relief  in  this  part  of  the  appointment — it  should 
be  at  least  ^100  wet  and  ^fioo  dry.  When  you 
have  carried  your  point  of  discarding  the  ode,  and 
my  point  of  getting  the  sack,  you  will  be  exactly 
in  the  position  of  Davy  in  the  farce,  who  stipulates 
for  more  wages,  less  work,  and  the  key  of  the 
ale-cellar. 

Mr.  Bridges  at  present  receives  ^72  from  the  Lord 
Chamberlain's  department  and  ^27  from  the  Lord 
Steward's  "  in  Heu  of  a  butt  of  sack."  In  other  words, 
Pye's  greed  simply  resulted  in  a  reduction  of  salary. 
Mr.  Bridges  is  not  primarily  a  bacchanalian  poet, 

238 


THE  LAUREATES 

but  I  cannot  think  that  he  would  object  if  some 
member  of  Parliament,  with  a  soul  above  trickery, 
the  Statute  of  Limitations,  and  the  Gaming  Act, 
should  begin  agitating  for  the  undoing  of  an  ancient 
wrong,  and  the  restoration  of  a  still  more  ancient 
perquisite. 


239 


LETTERS 

TWO  years  ago  Mr.  George  Saintsbury 
announced  that  his  "  Notes  From  a  Cellar 
Book  "  would  be  his  last  book.  The  universal  com- 
ment was  that  a  man  who  was  still  capable  of  pro- 
ducing a  little  masterpiece  like  that  had  no  right  to 
stop.  He  has  not  stopped.  Nature  was  not  to  be 
driven  out  for  good,  even  with  a  corkscrew.  Mr. 
Saintsbury  has  returned  to  normal.  His  latest  enter- 
prise, A  Letter  Book,  might  be  described  as  consist- 
ing of  notes  on  the  National  Cellar  of  Letters.  He 
has  the  advantage  here  of  being  able  to  illustrate  his 
disquisition  on  growths  with  samples  which  the 
reader  may  taste  for  himself  ;  exquisite  as  it  was,  his 
last  work  would  have  been  still  more  so  had  a  similar 
provision  been  possible  for  those  who  studied  it. 

There  is  a  suggestion  in  the  preface  that  Mr. 
Saintsbury  regards  his  volume  as  a  cairn  or  mauso- 
leum celebrating  a  dead  art.  He  is  not  alone  in 
thinking  the  English  Letter  a  fit  subject  for  an  epitaph. 
We  cannot,  of  course,  be  quite  sure  that  our  age 
will  not  produce  great  letter- writers.  We  never  know 
what  is  going  on  behind  the  scenes  in  any  regard  ; 
history  is  bound  to  produce  surprises — as,  for  in- 
stance, Disraeli's  letters  to  Queen  Victoria.  But  we 
do  know  for  a  certainty  that  the  composition  of  good 
letters  is  demonstrably  less  general  than  it  was  in 
the  eighteenth  century.  In  that  century  all  one's 
friends  would  have  been  writing  long  and  polished 
epistles  ;  in  this  century  they  certainly  do  not. 
Communications  have  improved.  A  man  must  go 

240 


LETTERS 

as  far  as  China  before  we  feel  he  is  really  cut  off  from 
us,  and  not  Hkely  to  drop  in  at  any  moment  ;  and 
even  there  he  will  be  getting  from  cables  and  news- 
papers far  more  information  about  wars,  poKtics, 
books,  pictures,  the  weather,  the  movements  of  the 
great,  and  all  the  other  topics  of  Horace  Walpole 
than  we  could  ever  compress  into  informative  letters. 
It  is  disheartening  to  tell  a  man  things  he  must  know 
already  ;  we  are  not  equal  to  merely  re-writing  the 
newspapers  in  our  own  whimsical,  picturesque, 
idiosyncratic  styles. 

We  are  always  rushing  about  ;  so  are  our  corres- 
pondents ;  our  letters  approximate  to  telegrams 
containing  merely  essential  demands,  instructions, 
private  news,  and  a  casual  sentence  of  cheer  merely 
inserted  to  give  them  a  faint  touch  of  humanity.  The 
Gray  or  the  Cowper,  living  in  some  rustic  vicarage 
or  other  such  secluded  retreat,  may  still  be  com- 
municating, in  leisurely  style,  with  a  few  old  friends 
about  household  affairs,  eccentric  literature,  the 
migrations  of  swallows  and  the  manners  of  ducks. 
If  he  is,  so  much  the  better  for  posterity  ;  but  he 
will  lack  the  background  of  lesser  lights.  In  the  great 
age  almost  every  educated  person  wrote  good  letters; 
the  existing  stores  are  not  yet  fully  explored.  In  our 
age  we  know  from  our  own  experience  that  this  is 
not  so.  And  I  fancy  that  our  posterity  will  be  especi- 
ally poorer  by  virtue  of  the  lack  of  substantial  letters 
from  eminent  writers,  whose  Hves  and  private 
opinions  arouse  so  natural  a  curiosity.  Gray,  Cowper, 
Lamb,  Keats,  Shelley,  Byron,  Browning — their 
letters,  crowded  with  interest,  fill  many  volumes. 
But    I   have    never   heard   that    any   of   our    great 

241  R 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

contemporaries  has  shown  the  slightest  inclination  to 
such  discursiveness  ;  the  best  literary  letters  that 
I  have  seen  have  been  tapped  out  on  typewriters  : 
letters  can  be  done  so  much  more  quickly  on  type- 
writers. Let  us  console  ourselves  with  the  reflection 
that  there  are  already  far  more  fine  English  letters 
in  existence  than  most  of  us  have  managed  to  read  ; 
a  man,  before  seriously  complaining,  should  go 
through  the  sixteen  volumes  of  Horace  Walpole. 
Our  letters  are  one  of  the  glories  of  our  literature, 
and  any  book  which  calls  attention  to  them  should 
be  welcome. 

Two  good  sorts  of  anthologies  of  letters  may  be 
conceived.  Mr.  Lucas,  in  his  delightful  collections, 
drew  his  materials  from  an3rwhere  and  everywhere. 
He  was  in  search  of  the  most  amusing  and  charming 
things  he  could  find  ;  he  roped  in  every  sort  of 
author  ;  his  books  exist  for  their  own  sakes.  Mr. 
Saintsbury's  collection  is  of  the  other  kind.  With 
the  exception  of  a  few  engaging  things  such  as  that 
by  Ballard  (of  the  *'  British  Ladies  ")  his  specimens 
are  entirely  drawn  from  the  letters  of  great  letter- 
writers  and  great  authors — they  include,  by  the  way, 
an  unpublished  example  of  Stevenson.  They  are 
chosen  avowedly  to  illustrate  his  historical  sketch 
of  the  progress  of  the  art  :  the  chief  figures  must  all 
be  here,  and  no  great  amount  of  space  can  be  allowed 
to  any  of  them  :  we  have  but  one  letter  from  Lamb, 
but  one  from  Cowper,  but  one  from  Walpole,  but 
two  from  Gray.  They  are  freshly  chosen,  and  a  book 
which  contained  nothing  but  these  and  the  two  noble 
love-letters  of  Dorothy  Osborne  would  be  worth 
reading.   Scarcely  anything  in  the  book  could  be 

242 


LETTERS 

superseded  by  anything  better  unless  it  be  Ruskin's 
letter  to  the  Daily  Telegraph,  chosen,  I  fear,  with  a 
touch  of  maHce,  which  is  full  of  nobility  and  wisdom, 
but  is  oh  !  how  far  from  being  intimate  !  But  the 
volume  is  rather  a  chapter  of  history  than  an  anth- 
ology. And,  in  fact,  Mr.  Saintsbury's  own  writing 
fills  a  half  of  it.  His  introduction  is  a  hundred  pages 
long  :  a  masterly  summary  of  the  ways  and  means 
of  correspondents  from  the  earliest  ages.  In  the 
course  of  it  Mr.  Saintsbury  not  merely  sketches  and 
explains  the  general  changes  which  have  taken  place 
from  age  to  age,  but  does  full  justice  to  all  the  great 
letter- writers  in  our  language,  amongst  whom  it  is 
pleasant  to  notice  that  he  puts  Lady  Mary  Montagu, 
who,  in  our  day,  has  received  little  lip-service,  and 
scarcely  any  real  attention.  And  the  whole  essay  is, 
one  need  scarcely  say,  amusing  and  provocative  in 
the  extreme.  So  are  the  notes.  Mr.  Saintsbury's 
first  extract  comes  from  the  letters  of  Synesius,  who 
was  Bishop  of  Ptolemais  in  the  early  fifth  century. 
It  begins  : 

I  have  already  got  three  hundred  spears  and  as 
many  cutlasses,  though  I  had,  even  before,  only 
half  a  score  two-edged  swords  :  and  these  long  flat 
blades  are  not  forged  with  us.  But  I  think  the 
cutlasses  can  be  struck  more  vigorously  into  the 
enemies'  bodies,  and  so  we  shall  use  them.  And 
at  need  we  shall  have  bludgeons — for  the  wild 
olive  trees  are  good  with  us. 

Of  the  bludgeon  referred  to  Mr.  Saintsbury  says  in 
a  footnote  that  "  it  was  probably  like  the  lathi  which 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

the  mild  Hindoo  takes  with  him  to  political  meet- 
ings." It  is  a  characteristic  start  for  Mr.  Saintsbury, 
who  himself  has  never  attended  the  most  academic 
of  confabulations  without  his  bludgeon.  It  was 
distressing  a  few  years  ago  to  see  him  formally 
abdicating  this  formidable  weapon,  as  Prospero  his 
wand  ;  and  now  all  the  more  delightful  to  see  him 
in  the  arena  again  clubbing  right  and  left.  His  notes 
to  the  letters  are  full  of  his  old  gay  pugnacity,  with 
clean  downright  words  for  all  the  authors,  critics, 
politicians,  puritans,  social  institutions,  and  historical 
developments  which  he  considers  inimical  to  truth, 
good  taste  and  the  joy  of  life. 

There  never  was  a  better  writer  of  footnotes  ; 
every  sentence  Mr.  Saintsbury  writes  has  his  char- 
acter stamped  upon  it,  and  his  memory,  which  is  as 
prodigious  as  his  erudition,  enables  him  to  juxta- 
pose the  most  surprising  variety  of  illustrations. 
Independent  judgments,  odd  facts,  and  comic  stories 
appear  on  every  page.  Discussing  whether  or  not 
Dorothy  Osborne  was  born  in  the  Castle  in  Guernsey, 
he  says  that  "  the  present  writer  (who  has  danced, 
and  played  whist,  within  its  walls)  hopes  she 
was."  It  isn't  exactly  evidence,  but  it  is  pleasant 
to  know  it.  Encountering  a  denunciation,  very 
justifiable,  of  lecturing  by  Charles  Lamb,  he  puts 
as  footnote  : 

Lamb  would  have  enjoyed  a  recent  newspaper 
paragraph,  which,  stating  that  an  inquest  had 
been  held  on  someone  who,  after  lecturing  some- 
where, was  taken  ill  and  expired,  concluded  thus  : 
"  Verdict  :    Death  from  natural  causes." 

244 


LETTERS 

He  remarks  of  Ruskin  that  "  If  anybody  ever  could 
write  beautifully  about  a  broomstick  '  he  could  : 
though  perhaps  it  is  a  pity  he  so  often  did."  A 
mention  of  a  pike  in  Kingsley's  racy  letter  to  Tom 
Hughes  gives  him  occasion  for  a  dissertation  on  the 
pike's  physiognomy  :  "  And  in  fact  the  pike  is  not 
a  cheerful-looking  fish.  Even  two  whom  the  present 
writer  once  saw  tugging  at  the  two  ends  of  one  dead 
trout  in  a  shallow,  did  it  sulkily."  Introducing  his 
selection  from  Charles  Lamb,  he  recalls  to  mind 
"  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold's  very  agreeable  confession, 
when  he  was  asked  to  select  his  poems,  that  he 
w^anted  to  select  them  all."  Mr.  Saintsbury  is,  in 
fact,  always  and  everywhere  racy  :  as  much  of  a 
piece  as  Charles  Lamb  himself  :  and  if  you  can 
enjoy  him  at  all,  you  can  enjoy  the  whole  of  him. 
Had  he  written  that  unfortunately-abandoned  '*  His- 
tory of  Wine,"  which  he  contemplated  for  so  many 
years,  it  would  have  been  as  lively  as  his  ''  History 
of  the  French  Novel  "  ;  in  a  Grammar  or  a  Study 
of  Fluctuations  in  Prices  he  would  be  as  lively,  as 
original,  as  anecdotal,  as  he  is  anywhere.  Give  him 
any  excuse,  and  he  will  start  pouring  out  quotations, 
allusions,  challenges,  dogmatic  judgments,  recol- 
lections, and  jokes  from  his  vast  horn  of  plenty.  The 
present  volume  is  one  more  instalment  of  him  ;  and 
no  assurances  of  his  will  prevent  one  from  expecting 
more. 


245 


GLANDS 

THE  book  before  me  is  entitled  The  Glands 
Regulating  Personality^  and  its  author  is  Dr. 
Louis  Berman,  of  Columbia  University.  This  is  not 
the  kind  of  book  which  I  normally  review,  or  have 
any  scientific  competence  to  discuss.  But  I  took  it 
up  casually,  and  a  phrase  in  it  struck  me.  Dr.  Berman 
remarks  : 

To  bring  to  mind  an  immediate  complete  image 
of  the  hyperthyroid  face,  one  should  think  of 
Shelley. 

This  agreeable  association  of  ideas  led  me  on  ;  and 
finding  the  phrase,  '*  A  man's  chief  gift  to  his  child- 
ren is  his  internal  secretion  composition,"  I  knew  I 
must  go  through  with  it.  Here,  beyond  doubt,  was 
one  more  of  these  men  with  an  explanation,  satisfac- 
tory to  himself,  of  everything  that  exists.  So  through 
thyroid  and  pituitary,  pineal,  adrenal  and  thymus 
I  pursued  my  way,  marvelling  at  one  of  the  most 
remarkable  medleys  of  erudition,  illogicality,  lack 
of  taste,  disinterested  passion,  complacency  and 
bad  English  that  I  have  seen  since  I  read  Freud's 
most  humourless  masterpiece,  namely,  his  book  on 
Wit. 

Dr.  Berman  takes  the  glands  one  by  one  and  out- 
lines their  spheres  of  influence.  He  compares  them 
to  the  Directors  of  a  Large  Corporation  :  he  might 
almost  call  them  our  Glandlords.  From  one  to 
another  he  passes  in  an  almost  lyrical  strain.  For 
example  :    "In  such  enthusiasm  for  the  thyroid  as 

246 


GLANDS 

a  determinant  of  evolution,  its  pillar  of  cloud  by 
day  and  column  of  fire  by  night,  one  should  not 
forget  the  other  glands  of  internal  secretion."  En 
route  he  throws  out  numerous  definitions.  "  Mas- 
culinity," he  says,  "may  be  described  as  a  stable, 
constant  state  in  the  organism  of  Hme  salts,  and  the 
feminine  as  an  unstable  variable  state  of  lime  salts." 
*'  The  mother  expresses,"  he  observes,  "  the  deep 
craving  of  protoplasm  for  immortality."  And,  in  a 
phrase  reminiscent  of  Sir  WiUiam  Harcourt's,  *'  We 
are  all  SociaHsts  now,"  he  says  that  we  now  recognise 
that  "  we  are  all,  more  or  less,  partial  hermaphro- 
dites." Almost  everything  has  been  run  down  except 
the  fluid  of  love,  w^hich,  beyond  doubt,  exists  in  the 
interstitial  cells.  Having  done  with  the  separate 
glands,  he  passes  to  consider  their  influence  on  per- 
sonality. He  uses  Mr.  Strachey's  account  of  Florence 
Nightingale  for  a  ruthless  analysis  of  the  glands 
that  made  her  what  she  was  ;  Caesar,  Napoleon, 
and  Nietzsche  are  other  of  his  specimens.  He  re- 
grets that  they  did  not  live  later,  so  that  science 
could  have  rectified  them.  For  the  answer  to  ''  What 
is  Man  ?  "  has  been  found.  It  is — I  don't  think  it  a 
very  complete  answer — *'  Man  is  regulated  by  his 
glands  of  Internal  Secretion." 

*'  The  chemistry  of  the  soul  !  "  It  is,  says  Dr. 
Berman,  a  great  phrase.  He  looks  forward — and, 
reading  his  book,  one  is  tempted  at  times  to  share 
in  this  Larger  Hope — to  a  time  when  statesmen 
will  make  it  their  business  to  raise  the  general  level 
of  intelHgence  by  a  "  judicious  use  of  endocrine 
extracts."  '*  Internal  glandular  analysis  may  become 
ler'ally  compulsory  for  those  about  to  mate  before 

247 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

the  end  of  the  present  century."  And  then  he  be- 
comes rhapsodic  : 

The  exact  formula  is  yet  far  beyond  our  reach. 
But  we  have  started  upon  the  long  journey  and 
we  shall  get  there.  Then  will  Man  truly  become 
the  experimental  animal  of  the  future,  experi- 
menting not  only  with  the  external  conditions  of 
his  life,  but  with  the  constituents  of  his  very 
nature  and  soul.  The  chemical  conditions  of  his 
being,  including  the  internal  secretions,  are  the 
steps  of  the  ladder  by  which  he  will  climb  to  those 
dizzy  heights  where  he  will  stretch  out  his  hands 
and  find  himself  a  God. 

It  is  a  strange  idea  of  God.  I  suppose  it  doesn't 
much  matter.  The  man  who  wants  to  Get  Omniscient 
Quick  is  no  new  type.  Pedantry,  self-satisfaction, 
fantastic  exaggeration  are  as  old  as  the  race.  One 
would  not  even  say,  "  Physician,  inject  thyself," 
to  Dr.  Berman  ;  such  men  as  he  add  to  the  colour 
of  life  ;  they  rode  other  hobby-horses  in  the  days  of 
"  Tristram  Shandy,"  but  their  character,  or  glandular 
composition,  remains  unchanged.  It  is,  however,  a 
pity  that  they  should  now  be  commonest  in  the 
world  of  what  used  to  be  called  exact  science  ;  for 
the  excesses  of  the  Freudians  and  their  analogues 
have  led  many  intelligent  people  into  a  very  scep- 
tical frame  of  mind  about  every  scientific  discovery 
and  speculation  whatsoever,  particularly  when  these 
have  a  bearing  upon  the  constitution  of  man.  Twenty 
years  ago  William  James,  meeting  Freud,  described 
him  in  a  letter  as  a  monomaniac.  The  frontiers  of 

248 


GLANDS 

psychology  and  physiology  are  infested  by  hosts  of 
these  ill-balanced  persons  who  get  hold  of  a  little 
truth  and  turn  it  into  an  idol.  Dr.  Berman  himself 
has  an  excellent  image  for  the  Freudians  :  he  says 
they  look  at  a  small  section  of  life  through  a  teles- 
cope and  think  it  is  the  universe.  The  metaphor 
applies  precisely  to  himself  ;  it  is  well  enough,  in  a 
poet's  sense,  to  see  the  universe  in  a  grain  of  sand, 
but  it  is  grotesque  to  see  it  in  the  glands.  At  best  all 
he  could  do  w^ould  be  merely  to  identify  a  machine, 
and  one  amongst  many. 

He  and  his  fellows  may,  however,  win  disciples 
amongst  the  large  number  of  persons  who  are  now 
able  to  dabble  in  this  kind  of  easy  science.  And  the 
one  really  serious  result  may  be  the  infection  of 
literature  with  it.  I  note  such  a  passage  as  : 

Christina  may  be  adrenal  cortex  centred  and 
so  masculinoid  :  courageous,  sporty,  mannish  in 
her  tastes,  aggressive  towards  her  companions. 
Dorothea  may  have  a  balanced  thyroid  and  pituit- 
ary, and  so  lead  the  class  as  good-looking,  studious, 
bright,  serene,  and  mature.  Florence,  who  has 
rather  more  thyroid  than  her  pituitary  can 
balance,  will  be  bright  but  flighty,  gay  but  moody, 
energetic,  but  not  as  persevering. 

It  may  prove  very  tempting  to  our  novelists.  All 
over  the  fiction  of  Europe  and  America  the  Freud- 
ian complexes  are  raging  furiously  together  ;  when 
the  novelists  have  tired  of  these  they  may  get  on  to 
the  glands  ;  we  shall  have  the  Tragedy  of  a  Pineal 
and    the    conflict    between    two    highly-developed 

249 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Adrenals.  In  one  thing  alone  there  is  a  gleam  of  hope. 
There  is  less  satisfaction  for  the  morbid  curiosity 
in  the  glandular  compilations  than  in  the  works  of 
Freud  and  his  school  ;  less  sensational  material. 
Nobody  will  take  up  with  the  glands  out  of  a  desire 
to  be  audacious  and  shocking  ;  they  are  dull  affairs. 
I  revert  to  the  phrase  with  which  I  opened.  I 
cannot  leave  it  there.  One  of  my  more  highly- 
developed  glands  is  secreting  hard.  Here  is  the 
result.  A  Ballade  of  the  Glandular  Hypothesis  : 


What  Hormones  had  that  proud  Egyptian  Queen  ? 

And  great  Napoleon,  who  had  cause  to  rue 
Deficiency  of  the  central  endocrine 

Which  finally  dried  up  at  Waterloo  ? 
Poor  Shelley's  optimism  was  undue, 

He  never  should  have  dreamed  at  such  a  pace  ; 
He  said  **  The  world's  great  age  begins  anew  "  ; 

But  Shelley  had  a  hyper-thyroid  face. 

II 

There  is  a  strange  secretion  flows  between 

The  interstitial  cells  ;   I  grant  it's  true 
It  hasn't  yet  been  actually  seen. 

Not  even  by  the  pioneering  few  ; 
Still  it  will  soon  be  bottled,  and  on  view, 

The  stuff  that  made  an  end  of  Ilium's  race, 
And  launched  a  thousand  ships  into  the  blue  : 

But  Shelley  had  a  hyper-thyroid  face. 


250 


GLANDS 
III 

The  toad  secretes  too  much  adrenalin, 

And  drunkards  are  a  thymo-centric  crew, 
Glandular  hyper-functioning  has  been 

Noted  in  Florence  Nightingale  ;   and  you 
Remember  Mr.  Julian  Huxley  drew 

Very  strange  transformations  which  took  place 
In  certain  axolotls  in  the  Zoo  : 

But  Shelley  had  a  hyper-thyroid  face. 

Envoi. 

Prince,  let  us  end  our  rhymes,  they  will  not  do  : 
Our  gonads  may  be  large  and  full  of  grace, 

And  comely  our  pituitaries,  too — 
But  Shelley  had  a  hyper-thyroid  face. 


251 


A   SUPPLEMENT  TO   WHITMAN 

PEOPLE  used  to  say  that  Whitman  was 
recognised  everywhere  except  in  his  own 
country  ;  that  he  had  been  accepted  as  a  peer  by 
the  English  poets  and  as  an  influence  by  the  French 
poets  before  the  generality  of  Americans  were  will- 
ing to  see  him  as  anything  more  than  a  grubby  old 
man  who  had  lived  near  Philadelphia.  There  was 
some  truth  in  the  charge,  and  it  is  still  evident, 
whenever  an  academic  history  comes  out,  that  in 
the  eyes  of  many  Americans  Whitman's  defects 
still  obscure  his  achievement.  But  once  an  American 
becomes  a  disciple  he  becomes  a  very  enthusiastic 
disciple  indeed.  To  Horace  Traubel,  Whitman  was 
very  much  what  Buddha  might  have  been.  So,  also, 
to  Professor  Emery  Holloway,  who  must  have 
devoted  years  to  the  excavation  of  Whitman's  for- 
gotten contributions  to  newspapers,  and  whose  tone, 
in  his  introduction,  seems  to  suggest  the  conviction 
that  any  small  fact  about  Whitman  is  of  prime  im- 
portance. There  is  certainly  a  good  deal  of  inform- 
ation of  all  sorts  in  this  introduction.  We  are  told 
that  much  of  the  poet's  early  Hfe  "  was  to  be  spent 
in  boarding-houses  and  hotels,  a  fact  which  doubt- 
less had  its  influence  in  shaping  his  rather  detached 
attitude  towards  the  family  as  an  institution  "  ; 
that  his  early  Puritanism  led  him  to  "  excoriate  " 
the  users  of  even  tea,  coffee,  and  tobacco  ;  and  that 
when  he  first  meditated  a  long  book  he  proposed  to 
omit  all  reference  to  sex,  on  the  ground  that  he  knew 
nothing   whatever    about    it.    Later    on,    quantum 

252 


A   SUPPLEMENT   TO   WHITMAN 

miitatiis  !  But  informative  as  the  introduction  is,  I 
don't  think  that  anybody  could  call  it  critical.  And, 
indeed,  if  Professor  HoUoway  were  a  critical  ad- 
mirer of  Whitman,  or,  indeed,  a  critical  lover  of 
any  literature  whatsoever,  he  certainly  would  not 
have  thought  it  worth  while  to  resurrect  the  contents 
of  these  volumes,  writings  which  Whitman  himself 
had  deliberately  refrained  from  reprinting,  and  some 
of  which  are  so  feeble  that  it  is  difficult  to  remember 
that  the  author  of  them  was  a  man  of  genius. 

It  would  be  complimentary  to  say  even  that  the 
contents  of  these  two  volumes  are  worth  having. 
Those  who  are  interested  in  anything  that  Whitman 
did  may  Uke  to  see  them  once  ;  those  who  are  merely 
interested  in  good  literature  will  regard  them  as  so 
much  wasted  paper.  The  poetry  is  remarkably  little 
in  proportion  to  the  prose  ;  only  thirty-one  pages 
out  of  many  hundreds,  with  the  addition  of  a  few 
pages  of  scraps  from  notebooks.  Such  as  it  is,  it 
shows  that  Whitman,  before  casting  off  the  "  bond- 
age "  of  rhyme,  attempted  with  very  small  success 
to  write  poetry  both  in  manner  and  in  matter  re- 
sembling the  conventional  verses  of  his  time.  Take 
the  '*  Spanish  Lady,"  which  begins  : 

On  a  low  couch  reclining 

When  slowly  waned  the  day. 
Wrapt  in  gentle  slumber, 

A  Spanish  maiden  lay. 

O  beauteous  was  the  lady  ; 

And  the  splendour  of  the  place 
Matched  well  her  form  so  graceful, 

And  her  sweet,  angelic  face. 

253 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

But  what  doth  she  so  lonely, 
Who  ought  in  courts  to  reign  ? 

For  the  form  that  there  Ues  sleeping 
Owns  the  proudest  name  in  Spain. 

'Tis  the  lovely  Lady  Inez, 

De  Castro's  daughter  fair, 
Who  in  the  castle  chamber 

Slumbers  so  sweetly  there. 

This,  in  point  both  of  metrical  distinction  and  con- 
tent, is  about  on  a  par  with 

Little  drops  of  water, 
Little  grains  of  sand. 

Whitman  wrote  it  at  the  age  of  twenty-one.  But  he 
was  twenty-seven  when  he  produced  the  *'  Ode  to 
be  sung  at  Fort  Greene,"  beginning  : 

O  God  of  Columbia  !  O  Shield  of  the  Free  ! 

More  grateful  to  you  than  the  fanes  of  old  story, 

Must  the  blood-bedewed  soil,  the  red  battleground, 

be 

Where    our    forefathers    championed    America's 

glory  ! 

Then  how  priceless  the  worth  of  the  sanctified  earth 

We  are  standing  on  now.  Lo  !  the  slopes  of  its  girth 

Where  the  martyrs  were  buried  :    Nor  prayers, 

tears,  or  stones. 
Marked   their   crumbled-in   coffins,   their   white 
holy  bones. 

At  twenty-nine  he  was  producing  blank  verse  a  long 
way  after  Wordsworth's.  At  thirty  he  was  feeling 

254 


A   SUPPLEMENT   TO   WHITMAN 

his  way  with  free  verse  ;  but  this  collection  contains 
only  two  or  three  scraps  of  verse  from  the  later 
period,  none  of  them  worth  having  except  as  **  docu- 
ments." 

Prose  fills  up  the  greater  part  of  these  volumes  ; 
but  Whitman's  *'  uncollected  "  prose  is  not  much 
more  interesting  than  his  "  uncollected  verse."  The 
first  prose  piece  quoted  is  dated  1838.  It  is  taken 
from  the  "  Long  Island  Democrat,"  and  is  described 
as  ''  the  earUest  extant  prose  from  Whitman's  pen." 
I  think  I  had  better  quote  it  in  full  in  order  to  illus- 
trate what  happens  when  enthusiasts  get  hold  of  a 
modern  writer.  It  is  headed  "  Eff"ects  of  Lightning" 
— as  it  might  be  "  Strange  Happening  on  an  Omni- 
bus "  or  **  Woman  Faints  at  Princess  Mary's 
Wedding  " — and  this  is  how  it  goes  : 

At  Northport,  on  Sunday,  28th  ultimo,  an 
unfortunate  and  somewhat  singular  accident 
occurred  from  the  lightning.  Mr.  Abraham  Miller, 
of  that  place,  had  been  in  the  fields  engaged  in 
some  farm  work,  and  was  returning  home,  as  a 
storm  commenced  in  the  afternoon,  carrying  in 
his  hands  a  pitchfork.  A  friend  of  his,  who  was 
with  him,  advised  him  not  to  carry  it,  as  he  con- 
sidered it  dangerous.  Mr.  Miller,  however,  did  not 
put  down  the  fork,  but  continued  walking  with 
it  ;  he  had  gone  some  distance  home,  and  had 
just  put  up  the  bars  of  a  fence  he  passed  through, 
when  a  violent  clap  of  thunder  occurred,  followed 
by  a  sharp  flash.  The  acquaintance  of  Mr.  Miller 
was  sHghtly  stunned  by  the  shock,  and,  turning 
round  to  look  at  his  companion,  he  saw  him  lying 

255 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

on  his  face  motionless.  He  went  to  him  and  found 
him  dead,  the  hghtning,  having  been  attracted 
by  the  steel  tines  of  the  fork,  had  torn  his  hand 
slightly  and  killed  him  on  the  instant. 

We  may  be  exceedingly  sorry  for  Mr.  Abraham 
Miller  without  thinking  that  the  tale  of  his  demise 
was  worth  printing  ;  a  single  line  to  the  effect  that 
Whitman  was  ''  at  this  time  engaged  in  journalism" 
would  have  sufficed  as  a  substitute.  The  later  papers 
are  better  than  this.  There  are  fragments  of  fiction  ; 
there  are  essays  ;  there  are  obituaries  ;  there  are 
political  tracts  ;  there  are  fragments  of  literary 
criticism.  Some  of  these  last  have  a  certain  interest. 
The  young  Whitman  boldly  defended  Dickens 
against  those  who  accused  the  novelist  of  painting 
horrible  pictures  of  low  life.  The  poor,  he  said,  were 
shown  examples  of  worth  by  poverty  deprest,  and 
the  rich  were  made  to  taste  "  distresses  of  want  " 
which  were  beyond  their  immediate  experience. 
He  said,  stupidly,  of  Dr.  Johnson  that  **  he  was  a 
sour,  malicious,  egotistical  man  "  and  "  a  sycophant 
of  power  and  rank  "  ;  that  his  heart  could  only  be 
indicated  by  '*  the  sign  minus,"  and  that  **  his  soul 
was  a  bad  one."  William  Cullen  Bryant  he  described 
as  '*  one  of  the  best  poets  in  the  world  "  ;  he  liked 
Carlyle  ;  he  said  that 

Keats — peace  to  his  ashes — was  one  of  the 
pleasantest  modern  poets,  and,  had  not  the  grim 
monster.  Death,  so  early  claimed  him,  would 
doubtless  have  become  one  of  the  most  distin- 
guished. 

256 


A   SUPPLEMENT   TO   WHITMAN 

He  called  Lamb  '*  the  pleasant  Elia,"  he  argued 
that  less  than  justice  was  done  to  Longfellow,  "  an 
honour  and  a  glory  as  he  is  to  the  American  name," 
and  an  equal  of  Wordsworth  ;  he  described  Melville 
as  "  readable,"  and  he  was  extremely  enthusiastic 
about  authors  as  varied  as  Ruskin,  James  Thomson, 
and  Martin  Tupper,  whom  he  described  as  "  one 
of  the  rare  men  of  the  time."  A  large  portion  of  the 
second  volume  is  occupied  by  a  novel,  written  in 
the  interests  of  Temperance,  alias  total  abstinence. 
It  is  headed  : 

FRANKLIN  EVANS, 

or 

THE  INEBRIATE. 

A  Tale  of  the  Times. 

By  WALTER  WHITMAN. 

and  it  was  announced  in  the  "  New  World  "  as  being 
by  '*  one  of  the  best  Novelists  of  this  country  "  ;  which 
was  very  misleading.  The  papers  on  the  antiquities 
of  Brooklyn,  which  conclude  this  collection,  are,  on 
the  whole,  much  the  most  interesting — as  they  are 
almost  the  latest — of  the  pieces  now  brought  to- 
gether. 

Whitman  was  never  very  successful  in  prose, 
though  some  of  his  table-talk  is  stimulating  and 
amusing.  We  had  better  get  back  to  "  Leaves  of 
Grass,"  his  real  legacy.  That  collection  is  at  once  an 
achievement,  a  revelation,  and  a  warning.  It  con- 
tains some  of  the  noblest  poetry  of  modern  times  ; 
it  also  contains  some  of  the  flattest.  W^hitman  was 
born  a  poet,  but  there  were  strains  in  his  character 

257  s 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

which  prevented  him  from  making  the  most  of  his 
natural  endowment.  He  had  a  muhipUcity  of  objects  ; 
he  wished  to  Americanise  America  and  to  reform 
society  in  accordance  with  a  programme  of  his  own. 
He  was  extremely  anxious  to  exhibit  himself  as  the 
most  free  and  independent  citizen  alive.  He  was 
anxious,  especially  after  he  found  that  traditional 
forms  very  much  cramped  his  style,  to  liberate 
verse  from  the  ''  shackles  "  of  rhyme  and  regular 
rhythm  with  which  an  effete,  aristocratic,  and  mili- 
tarist Europe  had  invested  it.  The  result  was  a  great 
deal  of  '*  verse  "  which  was  no  more  than  free  prose, 
and  pamphleteering  or  merely  informative  prose  at 
that.  There  are  included  amongst  his  works  very 
many  poems,  or  parts  of  poems,  like  this  : 

I  am  the  train. 

Panting,  rolling,  roaring  through  tunnels, 

RattHng  along  causeways,  shrieking  through  flying 

towns, 
I  go  from  East  to  West,  through  Virginia,  Kentucky, 

Missouri,  Kansas,  Arizona,  to  California. 
I  link  East  to  West  of  this  great  Continent, 
The  pale  clerk  of  the  cities 
And  the  bronzed  red-shirted  broncho-buster  of  the 

ranches. 

Whitman  did  not  write  that  :  I  have  just  done  it 
myself.  But  Whitman  might  quite  well  have  written 
it  when  uninspired  :  it  ought  not  to  be  printed  as 
anything  but  prose,  and  even  as  prose  it  is  not  good. 
He  is  often  matter-of-fact,  and,  when  not  matter- 
of-fact,  often  rhetorical.  And  the  important  thing 

258 


A   SUPPLEMENT   TO   WHITMAN 

to  note  about  him  is  that  when  he  is  at  his  best  there 
is  never  any  doubt  that  it  is  free  verse  he  is  writing 
and  not  free  prose.  Sometimes,  as  in  **  O  Captain, 
my  Captain,"  he  is  even  impelled  to  make  rhymes, 
though  not  very  good  ones  ;  always,  as  he  rises  to 
poetry,  he  tends  to  write  like  other  poets,  in  rhythms 
more  repetitive  than  those  of  prose.  The  anthologists 
drawing  on  him  always  draw  on  the  same  small 
group  of  poems  :  "  When  Lilacs  First  in  the  Door- 
yard  Bloomed,"  ''  The  Dirge  for  Two  Veterans," 
and  so  on.  In  those  poems,  his  best,  he  was 
least  pecuhar,  more  near  to  his  brothers.  He 
remained,  usually,  "  free  "  ;  he  abstained  from 
rhyme,  and  his  lines,  typographically,  were  of  vary- 
ing lengths.  So  were  Ossian's,  Southey's,  Blake's 
sometimes,  Matthew  Arnold's  sometimes  ;  there 
was  nothing  novel  in  it.  Being  a  genuine  poet  he  did 
find  his  imagination  stirred  by  certain  things  which 
had  not  previously  been  "  mentioned  "  by  poets  ; 
but  his  deliberate  cultivation  of  originality  led  to 
nothing  at  all. 


259 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  POETRY 

DURING  the  last  ten  years  the  appearance 
of  a  large  and  voluble  school  of  writers  who 
openly  proclaim  themselves  to  be  in  revolt  against 
"  conventional  poetry  "  has  led  to  a  great  deal  of 
discussion  in  America  as  to  the  nature  and  develop- 
ment of  the  art.  I  suspect  that  the  discussion  is 
dying  down  ;  I  think  that  the  extremer  manifesta- 
tions of  *'  revolt  "  are  waning,  and  that  where  the 
apostles  of  revolt  are  poseurs  or  fools  they  are  being 
found  out.  But  if  a  justification  is  to  be  found  for  all 
the  bad  "  free  verse  "  that  has  been  written  in 
America,  and  all  the  nonsense  that  has  been  talked 
about  it,  it  is  to  be  found  in  this  book.  Had  the 
nonsense  not  been  written,  and  had  it  not  been  taken 
seriously,  Professor  Lowes  would  not  have  found  it 
desirable  to  re-examine  the  foundations  of  poetry. 
And  had  Professor  Lowes  not  written  Convention 
and  Revolt  in  Poetry  we  should  have  forgone  the  best 
book  about  poetry  which  has  been  written  in  our 
generation.  Those  who  have  a  wide  acquaintance 
with  books  about  literature  written  by  American 
professors  may  rub  their  eyes  at  this  statement.  But 
it  is  true. 

I  know  no  book  where  so  much  of  the  ground  is 
covered,  no  book  in  which  so  many  true  and  valu- 
able things  about  poetry,  both  "  original  "  and 
"  quoted,"  are  contained.  Professor  Lowes  goes 
considerably  farther  than  his  title  might  suggest. 
He  found,  immediately  he  approached  the  subject, 
that  he  could  not  argue  the  question  for  the  benefit 

260 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  POETRY 

of  puzzled  contemporaries  without  going  back 
to  the  very  roots  of  the  subject.  He  had  to  decide 
what  he  meant  by  poetry  (concluding,  inevitably, 
that  he  meant  what  all  interested  persons  have 
always  meant),  and  he  then  had  to  examine,  scientifi- 
cally and  historically,  the  common  marks  of  poetry 
in  point  of  content,  of  form,  and  of  diction.  He  notes 
the  universality,  in  poetry,  of  poetical  rhythm,  and 
hints  (he  might  have  gone  farther)  at  its  basis. 
He  explains  the  "  inevitability  of  imagery  "  on  the 
ground  of  the  inadequacy  of  words — he  might  here 
have  noted  the  common  association  between  un- 
usual emotion  and  the  use  of  imagery.  He  explains 
how  it  is  that,  men  being  what  they  are,  certain 
"  subjects  "  invariably  recur  in  poetry.  He  shows 
how  the  changing  circumstances  of  each  age  modify 
the  treatment  of  those  subjects  and  the  language 
and  imagery  employed.  And  he  gives  illustrations 
of  the  recurrent  phenomena  of  a  hardening  of  con- 
vention and  an  excess  of  reaction  against  convention; 
each  of  which  leads  to  lying,  musical  deficiency, 
and  a  diminution  of  poetic  influence.  So  wide  is  his 
range,  and  so  fertile  is  he  in  suggestion,  that  it  is 
utterly  impossible  here  to  give  even  a  synopsis  of 
his  conclusions. 

Professor  Lowes  concludes  that  '*  w^hen  dead 
conventions  squeak  and  gibber  in  the  streets  there 
are  just  three  ways  of  reckoning  with  them  "  : 

Poets  may  set  the  conventions  going  with  the 
detachment  of  a  phonograph,  and  even  absent 
themselves,  to  all  intents  and  purposes,  entirely. 
Or  they  may  exercise  creative  energy,  as  we  have 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

seen,  upon  dead  forms  and  empty  shells,  and 
bring  about  a  metamorphosis.  Or,  finally,  they 
may  rise  up  in  revolt,  repudiate  the  old  coinage 
altogether,  and  more  or  less  definitely  set  them- 
selves to  minting  new. 

It  doesn't  much  matter  what  happens,  he  says  ; 
the  wheel  always  returns.  That  is  pessimistic.  If 
reaction  goes  too  far  ;  if  it  goes  so  far  as  to  lead 
people  away  from  poetry  altogether  ;  if  they  alto- 
gether refuse  to  notice  what  they  feel  (for  example) 
about  love  or  death,  and  if  they  resist  the  rhythm 
when  it  comes,  a  generation's  powers  may  be  wasted. 
But  Professor  Lowes  does  not  really  leave  us  in 
doubt  as  to  his  position.  He  knows  that  "the  history 
of  English  poetry  is  an  illuminating  record  of 
periodical  farewells  to  folly,"  and  if  the  folly  could 
be  avoided  and  the  second,  and  only  fruitful  one,  of 
his  courses  be  always  pursued,  he  would  be  com- 
pletely happy. 

Only  in  one  small  particular  do  I  find  Professor 
Lowes 's  book  defective.  His  principles  are  sound, 
but,  in  view  of  the  fact  that  his  disquisition  was 
provoked  by  the  widespread  existence  of  **  revolt  " 
in  his  own  country,  he  might  have  taken  more  pains 
to  apply  them  to  the  contemporary.  Except  for  one 
poem  of  Rupert  Brooke's,  and  one  not  very  admir- 
able piece  of  free  verse,  he  quotes  nothing  from 
modern  English  poets  :  in  so  far  as  he  gives  modern 
instances,  his  examples  are  drawn  from  American 
writers,  and  mostly  from  those  who  may  ambigu- 
ously be  called  the  Revolting  School.  His  quotations 
are    all    pertinent,    but    he    seems    to    suggest    by 

262 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  POETRY 

implication  that  the  sillier  forms  of  revolt  have  been 
as  conspicuous  in  England  as  in  America.  It  is  not  so  ; 
in  so  far  as  we  have  witnessed  an  outbreak  here  it 
has  been  an  imported,  but  not  an  important,  thing  ; 
taken  part  in  by  persons  whose  affiliations  are  with 
America  and  Paris,  and  provoking  very  little  serious 
discussion.  If  one  age  in  our  poetry  has  succeeded 
another  the  transition  this  time  has  been  made  with 
unusual  ease.  Our  poets  have  incorporated  new 
experiences,  new  words  and  new  rhythms  in  the  last 
twenty  years  ;  they  exhibit  a  surprising  variety  ; 
but  the  best  of  them,  those  with  the  greatest  power 
of  communicating  thought  and  emotion  and  with 
the  most  evident  gifts  of  craftsmanship,  are  as 
traditional  as  they  are  modern.  The  difference  be- 
tween the  circumstances  of  the  two  countries  may 
be  illustrated  by  the  fact  that  in  America  Mr.  Robert 
Frost  is  regarded  as  a  rebellious  innovator,  whereas 
here  we  regard  him  as  thoroughly  traditional.  Con- 
vention, in  the  last  generation,  was,  it  appears,  much 
harder  in  America  than  it  was  here,  artificiality  and 
prettiness  and  pedantry  much  more  general  ;  the 
consequence  being  that  a  sincere  and  straightforward 
poet  whose  lines  are  not  all  drawn  with  a  footrule  is 
regarded  as  a  portent,  and  that  writers  with  less 
brain  and  heart  than  Mr.  Frost  are  thrown  into  a 
state  of  excessive  reaction  against  everything  that 
has  been  done  before.  Professor  Lowes  should  not 
suppose  that  anything  analogous  to  what  has  been 
happening  in  America  has  been  happening  here  ; 
we  have  had,  as  it  were,  a  Mormon  Mission,  but 
nobody  has  taken  any  notice  of  it.  Moreover,  I  think 
that  if  he  compels  himself  to  face  facts,  he  will  come 

263 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

to  the  conclusion  that  he  himself  does  not  really 
think  very  much  of  some  of  the  "  free  verse  "  which 
he  quotes.  He  is  fairly  cautious  about  it.  He  does 
seem  to  suggest  that  he  doesn't  see  very  much  in  it, 
but  that  it  has  been  passed  on  to  him  as  the  repre- 
sentative work  of  its  day,  and  that  consequently  he 
supposes  it  must  be  good.  He  goes  so  far  in  one  place 
as  to  quote  passages  from  the  prose  of  Mr.  Conrad, 
Walter  Pater,  and  Mr.  Hewlett,  and  set  them  against 
various  so-called  poems  by  young  apostles  of  revolt. 
Here,  arranged  in  the  familiar  typographical  way, 
is  a  fragment  from  one  of  Mr.  Conrad's  novels  : 

The  bright  domes 
Of  the  parasols 
Swayed  lightly  outwards 
Like  full-blown  blossoms 
On  the  rim  of  a  vase.  .  .  . 

The  wheels  turned  solemnly  ; 

One  after  another  the  sunshades  drooped, 

Folding  their  colours 

Like  gorgeous  flowers  shutting  their  petals 

At  the  end  of  the  day. 

And  here  is  his  extract  from  Mr.  Hewlett  : 

As  he  had  seen  her. 

So  he  painted.  .  .  . 

A  grey,  translucent  sea 

I^aps  silently 

Upon  a  little  creek 

And,  in  the  hush  of  a  still  dawn, 

The  myrtles  and  sedges  on  the  water's  brim 

Are  quiet.  .  .  . 

264 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  POETRY 

She  would  vanish,  we  know, 

Into  the  daffodils 

Or  a  bank  of  violets. 

And  you  might  tell  her  presence  there. 

Or  in  the  rustle  of  the  myrtles, 

Or  coo  of  doves 

Mating  in  the  pines  ; 

You  might  feel  her  genius 

In  the  scent  of  the  earth 

Or  the  kiss  of  the  West  wind  ; 

But  you  could  only  see  her 

In  mid- April, 

And  you  should  look  for  her 

Over  the  sea. 

Professor  Lowes  contrasts  these  with  certain 
modern  pieces  of  free  verse.  He  does  suggest  that 
he  cannot  tell  the  difference  between  one  and  the 
other  ;  he  is  aware  that  there  is  a  borderland  be- 
tween prose  and  verse,  which  both  may  be  haunting ; 
it  does  not  occur  to  him  that  in  almost  every  in- 
stance his  example  from  so-called  prose  is  not  merely 
more  regularly  rhythmical  than  his  examples  from 
so-called  verse,  but  that  it  is  usually,  in  point  of 
intelligence  and  feeling,  actually  far  better.  Here, 
from  one  who  is  distinctly  one  of  the  most  acute, 
economical,  and  painstaking  members  of  the  Re- 
volt, is  an  image  : 


Sand  cuts  your  petal, 
Furrows  it  with  hard  edge. 
Like  flint 
On  a  bright  stone. 

265 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

I  am  not  quite  sure  what  it  means ;  it  might  convey 
something  to  a  Japanese.  It  moves  me  through  none 
of  my  senses  ;  I  do  not  know  w^hy  it  should  be  called 
verse,  even  free  verse  ;  and  my  only  answer  is, 
'*  Well,  what  about  it  ?  "  I  should  not  dream  of 
suggesting  that  unrhymed  verse  written  in  irregular 
lines  is  necessarily  inferior  to  rh3nTied  verse  in  regular 
rhymes  ;  Arnold,  Henley,  and  many  before  them, 
had  written  it.  As  I  have  already  pointed  out,  it  is 
noticeable  that  Whitman  is  most  nearly  traditional 
in  point  of  rhythm  when  he  is  at  his  best,  just  as  it  is 
noticeable  that  Donne  is  least  Donnishly  crabbed 
and  obscure  when  he  is  at  his  best  :  the  finest 
achievements  of  the  unorthodox  are  orthodox. 

There  is.  Professor  Lowes  admits,  some  apparent 
physical  connection  between  a  high  state  of  emotion 
and  regularity  of  movement,  and  whenever  prose- 
writers  become  exalted  in  feehng,  they  tend  to  be 
more  regular  in  their  rhythms.  Grant  that  (and  it  is 
a  matter  beyond  our  control,  however  unreasonable 
we  may  presume  to  think  it)  and  the  utmost  free- 
dom is  permissible  if  a  man  can  make  use  of  it. 
Most  poets  do,  in  point  of  fact,  find  it  pleasant  and 
salutary  to  add  other  forms  of  repetitiveness  to  the 
one  that  appears  essential  ;  but  if  a  man  care  to 
abandon  rhyme,  and  even  Une,  let  him,  especially 
if  he  finds  that  they  cramp  him.  It  may  be  signifi- 
cant that  the  positive  achievements  of  the  pro- 
pagandist school  of  free-verse  writers  are  almost 
negligible  ;  but  a  man  should  use  whatever  form 
suits  him  best.  What  is  wrong  with  most  of  the  free- 
verse  writers  is  not  that  they  write  free- verse,  but 
that  they  lack  the  qualities  which  make  good  poets 

266 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  POETRY 

in  whatever  form  they  may  write.  The  worst  of  them 
are  principally  governed  by  a  desire  to  attract 
attention  or  a  desire  to  be  different  from  other  people, 
or  a  mere  radical  reaction  against  the  estabhshed 
thing — which,  for  such  are  the  conditions  of  life,  is 
often  the  inevitable  and  necessary  thing.  The  best 
of  them  are  in  some  instances  honest  and  intelligent, 
but  devoid  of  passion  and  of  ear,  unacquainted  with 
the  emotions  that  have  always  produced  what  men 
have  agreed  to  call  poetry,  or  else  so  deluded  by 
doctrine  that  they  have  failed  to  make  a  connection 
between  the  emotions  they  experience  and  the  art 
they  practise.  It  is  not  even  enough  to  "  keep  the 
eye  on  the  object  "  if  there  is  nothing  behind  the 
eye. 


267 


THE  PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH 

THERE  is,"  says  Professor  Matthews,  at 
the  opening  of  his  Essays  on  English,  *'no 
topic  about  which  men  dispute  more  frequently, 
more  bitterly,  or  more  ignorantly,  than  about  the 
right  and  the  wrong  use  of  words.  .  .  .  To  misuse 
words,  to  make  grammatical  blunders,  is  an  evidence 
of  illiteracy  ;  and  to  accuse  a  man  of  illiteracy  is  to 
disparage  the  social  standing  of  his  father  and  his 
mother."  He  manages  to  avoid  acerbity  himself, 
and  I  hope  that  I  shall  keep  my  own  black  passions 
in  control  while  writing  this  review. 

It  is  a  slight  book,  a  series  of  papers,  which  not 
only  avoid  pedantry,  but  do  not  aim  at  any  display 
of  scholarship.  The  book  is  readable  and  uniformly 
sensible — a  book  intended  for  the  non-specialist, 
which  presents  him  with  no  difficulties.  It  is  not  a 
treatise,  but  a  volume  of  good  and  useful  journalism. 
Professor  Matthews  was  apparently  incited  by  find- 
ing that  many  of  his  colleagues  in  the  American 
Academy  were  alarmed  at  the  prospects  of  our 
tongue.  They  thought  that  degeneration  had  already 
begun,  degeneration  like  that  which  marked  the 
later  history  of  Greek.  This,  they  maintained,  is 
our  Hellenistic  era.  Professor  Matthews,  instinct- 
ively revolting  against  so  dreary  a  view,  set  about  an 
examination  of  the  situation,  and  has  now  formulated 
his  own  opinion. 

I  assume  that  all,  or  almost  all,  of  the  readers  of 
these  lines  will  desire  two  things  :  that  the  EngUsh 
of  England  and  America  should  retain  both  its  vigour 

268 


THE  PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH 

and  its  homogeneity,  and  that,  if  possible,  its  use 
should  spread  amongst  the  peoples  of  the  world. 
Professor  Brander  Matthews,  who  speaks  English 
himself,  has  inherited  our  modes  of  thought  and 
feeling,  and  consequently  desires  the  perpetuation 
and  extension  of  Anglo-American  civiHsation,  treats 
both  these  aspects  of  his  subject.  With  regard  to  the 
latter,  there  is  not  much  said  and  there  is  little  to 
say.  Political  events  in  the  end  will  probably  deter- 
mine the  status  of  our  language  in  the  world.  If  we 
and  the  Americans  retain  the  power  we  have  we 
may  look  forward  to  a  steady  increase  in  the  number 
of  people  to  whom  our  tongue  is  a  birthright,  and  we 
may  reasonably  hope  that  it  (with  French  as  its 
nearest  competitor)  will  become  the  lingua  franca 
of  the  world,  with  consequent  results  in  the  laws, 
manners,  and  morals  of  the  world — for,  honestly, 
the  Germans  are  not  the  only  people  who  have 
desired  to  disseminate  their  Kultur,  though  they 
made  the  ghastly  mistake  of  thinking  it  possible  to 
spread  it  by  mere  boasting  and  force  of  arms.  Pro- 
fessor Matthew^s  dismisses  Volapuk  (which  is  dead 
anyhow)  and  Esperanto  ;  has  a  kind  word  for  Ido, 
and  a  kinder  for  Latin  ;  and  concludes  that  French 
will  ultimately  share  with  English  the  privilege  of 
being,  amongst  educated  men,  universal.  Beyond 
that  he  does  not  go  ;  and,  after  all,  prophecy  here 
has  gone  far  enough,  As  to  the  future  of  EngHsh 
(domestically),  he  is  optimistic.  I  think  that  had  he 
known  more  of  current  English  he  would  have  been 
more  optimistic  still. 

The  English  language  is  in  the  charge  of  two  great 
aggregations  of  states  :   the  British  Empire  and  the 

269 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Araerican  Union.  It  runs,  or  it  may  conceivably  not 
run,  two  risks.  On  the  one  hand  it  may  be  muddied 
by  too  great  an  influx  of  new  terms,  flooding  in  from 
every  quarter  of  the  English-speaking  globe  ;  on 
the  other  hand  it  may  be  the  victim  of  fissiparous 
tendencies  such  as  produced  the  divergence  be- 
tween Spanish  and  Portuguese.  The  fiirst  danger, 
Professor  Matthews  believes,  is  found  on  examination 
not  to  be  serious.  We  are  not  taking  words  faster 
than  our  fathers  did  ;  many  are  called  but  few  are 
chosen  ;  colloquialisms  change,  but  standard  English 
remains,  and  it  develops  slowly.  Its  risks  are  rather 
of  the  other  kind.  There  has  been  observable  too 
rigid  a  reluctance  to  admit  desirable  terms  from  the 
popular  speech,  a  slightly  exaggerated  inclination 
to  Latinity.  And,  as  Mr.  Bridges  has  vigorously 
argued,  our  difficulty  with  regard  to  foreign  im- 
portations is  that  we  do  not  naturalise  them  as  freely 
as  our  ancestors  did  ;  we  still  write  "  ennui  "  and 
''  nuance,"  and  write  them  in  italics.  The  words  we 
get  from  the  populace,  at  home  and  abroad,  seldom 
stay  unless  they  are  really  good  and  valuable.  There 
is  apparently  little  fear  that  English,  as  we  speak  it 
here,  will  merely  run  to  seed  so  long  as  we  do  not. 
But  is  the  unity  of  the  English  language  threatened  ? 
Is  there  any  tendency  on  the  part  of  English  speech 
and  American  speech  to  diverge  ? 

The  answer,  I  believe,  is  so  obvious  that  it  would 
not  be  worth  making  were  it  not  that  there  are  people 
in  both  countries  who  casually  assume  such  a  pro- 
cess to  be  inevitable.  There  are  local  differences, 
both  of  pronunciation  and  of  vocabulary.  But  the 
popular  speech  of  Illinois  is  no  farther  apart  from 

270 


THE  PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH 

that  of  Devonshire  than  that  of  Devonshire  is  from 
that  of  Whitechapel,  and  an  educated  American 
talks  more  Hke  an  educated  Englishman  than  does 
an  educated  Scot  who  has  remained  at  home.  This 
is  the  fact  ;  since  it  is  so  after  generations  during 
which  communications  between  the  two  continents 
were  not  so  easy  and  frequent  as  they  are  now,  and 
popular  education  was  less  widespread  and  uniform, 
there  is  ground  for  Professor  Matthews 's  argument 
that,  if  anything,  the  future  tendency  of  the  two 
divisions  of  one  speech  will  be  to  come  closer.  In 
these  days  even  slang,  provided  it  be  really  vivid 
slang,  crosses  the  Atlantic  very  rapidly,  and  an 
American  neologism  which  really  meets  a  demand 
for  a  new  word  spreads  to  England  instead  of  re- 
maining a  local,  differentiating  Americanism.  ''  The 
self-governing  dominions  of  the  British  Common- 
wealth," says  Professor  Matthews,  "  and  the  semi- 
independent  states  of  the  American  Union  are  all 
of  them  proving-ground  for  verbal  seedUngs  which 
may  in  time  be  transplanted  and  accHmated  (we 
should  say  acclimatised)  in  standard  English."  Our 
acquisitions  from  America  are  varied.  Amongst  the 
earliest  were  Indian  words  such  as  "  wigwam  "  and 
"  totem."  Many  of  the  later  ones  have  been  double 
words,  mostly  metaphorical.  Amongst  them  are 
"  scare  -  head,"  '*  wind  -  jammer,"  "  side  -  track," 
"  side-step,"  "  pussy-foot,"  "  high-brow,"  "  joy- 
ride,"  "  spell -binder,"  ''sky-scraper,"  "strap- 
hanger "  (there  never  was  a  word  we  more  acutely 
needed  than  that  one),  "  rough-rider,"  ''  sky-pilot," 
"  fool-proof,"  ''  gun-shy,"  "  sky-Hght."  ''  Boss  " 
and  "  boom  "  are  older  than  most  of  these.  The 

271 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

first  came  out  of  New  York,  and  the  second  from  the 
lumber-camps  of  Michigan.  There  was  a  time  when 
they  were  regarded  here  as  Americanisms  ;  their 
origin  is  hardly  realised  now  by  most  of  those  who 
habitually  use  them.  Simultaneously  new  English 
coinages  make  their  way  into  the  United  States. 
*'  Cad  "  and  ''  fad  "  were  at  first  only  localisms  ; 
they  were  Briticisms  struggling  for  existence,  and 
getting  slowly  into  sporadic  use  in  England,  until 
at  last  they  achieved  a  peaceful  penetration  into  the 
United  States.  "  Rough  "  has  gone  to  America, 
"  tough  "  may  finally  settle  here.  Some  words  and 
locutions  do  not  seem  to  thrive  overseas,  but,  if 
purely  ephemeral  slang  be  ruled  out,  they  are  not 
very  numerous. 

They  are  even  less  numerous  than  Professor 
Matthews  thinks.  He  might  have  made  his  case 
stronger,  but,  like  many  Americans  who  write  on 
the  language,  he  is  imperfectly  acquainted  with 
British  practice  ;  he  ought  to  have  asked  an  English- 
man to  check  his  illustrations  of  divergence.  He  is 
perfectly  correct  in  saying  that  the  American  **  back 
of  "  has  never  won  favour  here,  and  that  it  probably 
never  will  ;  he  notes  a  ''  British  localism  "  that 
may  not  spread  in  *'  directly,"  for  "  as  soon  as." 
But  several  words  which  he  thinks  we  do  not  use 
we,  as  a  fact,  use  daily.  He  is  right — it  is  the  first 
thing  the  Englishman  is  breathlessly  told  when  he 
lands  on  the  Island  of  Manhattan — in  saying  that 
what  is  a  "  tuxedo  "  in  America  is  known  only  as  a 
**  dinner-jacket  "  in  England.  It  is  also  true  that  a 
*'  drummer  "  is  in  England  a  "  commercial  traveller." 
But  his  authorities  have  misled  him  when  they  gave 

272 


THE  PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH 

him  to  suppose  that  the  word  ''  bedspread  "  is 
unknown  in  England.  He  gives  ''  cowboy "  and 
"  cuspidor  "  as  words  which  have  no  British  equi- 
valent ;  we  use  the  former  to  describe  an  object  we 
do  not  ourselves  produce,  and  our  equivalent  for 
the  latter  is  the  robust  word,  "  spittoon."  "  Fall," 
for  "  autumn,"  though  a  good  old  English  word,  is 
no  longer  used  in  England  ;  but  it  is  astonishing 
that  Professor  Matthews  should  believe  that  no- 
body in  England  uses  the  word  "  rooster,"  for 
"cock,"  or  "wih,"  for  "wither."  The  word 
"  rooster,"  he  says,  "  has  completely  faded  from 
memory  in  England."  "  There  would,"  he  proceeds, 

be  advantage  in  explaining  to  the  American  visitor 
that,  if  he  goes  to  an  Enghsh  hotel  for  a  dinner  at 
a  fixed  price,  he  will  be  at  liberty  to  call  for  a 
second  helping  of  anything  which  may  please  his 
palate  if  the  bill-of-fare  declares  that  "  a  follow 
of  any  dish  will  be  served  without  extra  charge." 

But  on  what  bill-of-fare  is  the  word  "  follow  "  to 
be  found,  used  as  an  equivalent  for  a  second  help- 
ing ?  You  may  find  the  word  in  Dickens  ;  it  may 
still  be  currently  employed  by  the  "  plump  head- 
waiter  at  the  Cock  "  ;  but  where  else  can  it  be  en- 
countered ?  Professor  Matthews  may  be  assured 
that  the  conventional  English  term — unless  you 
happen  to  prefer  "  another  go,"  "  another  whack," 
or,  more  quietly,  "  some  more  " — is  precisely  the 
same  as  the  American.  His  conclusion  stands:  "We 
cannot  help  seeing  that  the  divergencies  between 
British  English  and  American  English  are  relatively 

273  T 


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very  few  if  only  we  keep  in  mind  the  immense  vocabu- 
lary of  our  ever-expanding  language." 

Many  other  aspects  of  language  development  are 
touched  on  by  Professor  Matthews.  He  has  a  good 
deal  to  say  about  the  coinage  of  new  words.  One  is 
astonished  when  one  reflects  how  rapidly  it  is  pro- 
ceeding. The  new  words  swarm  ;  words  of  all  kinds  ; 
"  dope,"  "  enthuse,"  "  peeved,"  "  addict,"  "  secre- 
tariat," **  personnel,"  "opt,"  "  national  "  (the 
noun) — they  are  ever3rwhere,  and  we  may  devoutly 
hope  that  not  all  of  them  will  surivive,  for  not  all  of 
them  are  needed.  Professor  Matthews  calls  attention 
to  the  influence  of  headline-writers — who  must 
have  short  words — on  the  language.  He  remarks  on 
the  degeneration  of  words  :  somebody  once  said 
that  no  modern  writer  would  dare  to  say  that  '*  Adam 
led  his  blooming  Eve  out  of  her  blasted  Paradise." 
He  has  some  interesting  pages  about  words  which 
have  come  back  into  currency  after  having  been 
long  regarded  as  archaic,  these  including  such 
familiar  vocables  as  ''anthem,"  ''deluge,"  "prob- 
lem," "illusion,"  "sphere,"  "phantom,"  "plum- 
age," and  "  shapely."  He  deprecates  the  use  of 
words  in  writing  which  we  find  it  impossible 
to  use  in  speech,  giving  "  irrefragable  "  as  an 
example  ;  elsewhere  I  notice  himself  using  that 
signal  specimen  "  inexpugnable."  And  he  argues 
very  strongly  in  favour  of  the  complete  naturalisa- 
tion, phonetically  and  typographically,  of  foreign 
words  which  we  have  decided  that  we  cannot  do 
without.  There  is  an  unanswerable  case  in  favour  of 
this.  It  is  grotesque  to  go  on  writing  role  and  melee 
as  we  do  ;    our  ancestors  would  have  standardised 

274 


THE  PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH 

"  shover  "  and  "  garridge  "  by  now.  An  elaboration 
of  that  argument  may  be  found  in  one  of  the 
early  tracts  of  the  Society  of  Pure  EngHsh.  The 
latest  tract  issued  by  this  deserving  Society  deals 
with  something  less  vital,  but  very  interesting.  It 
registers  some  of  the  French  borrowings  from 
English,  demonstrating  that  our  exports  are  sub- 
stantial as  well  as  our  imports.  Until  the  late  seven- 
teenth century  the  French  took  virtually  nothing 
from  us  ;  but  since  the  Huguenots  began  trans- 
lating English  books  into  French  the  process  of 
absorption  has  never  flagged.  The  English  vocabu- 
laries of  war,  millinery  and  cookery  are  almost 
wholly  derived  from  France  ;  but  the  French  have 
drawn  quite  as  freely  on  us  for  their  vocabularies 
of  sport  and  politics. 


275 


DELICATE  DETAILS 

EVERY  day,  and  in  every  way,  we  are  learn- 
ing more  and  more  about  Swinburne's  life 
at  Putney.  Man  after  man  who  had  luncheon  at 
"  The  Pines  "  has  described  the  meal  ;  many  new 
facts  came  to  light  in  the  recent  "  Life  of  Watts- 
Dunton  "  ;  and  now  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton  comes 
along  with  a  mass  of  new  information  which  she 
was  in  a  peculiar  position  to  obtain.  She  had,  says 
the  publisher  of  the  Home  Life  of  Swinburne^ 
"  exceptional  opportunities  for  studying  the  great 
poet  in  the  various  phases  of  his  everyday  life.  No 
one  living  had  the  close  association  with  him  which 
she  enjoyed  as  the  wife  of  Swinburne's  dearest  and 
closest  friend,  and  no  one  else  could  have  drawn 
this  faithful  picture,  full  of  delicate  details,  of  the 
last  years  of  his  life."  From  early  girlhood  Mrs. 
Watts-Dunton  had  been  accustomed  to  revere  Swin- 
burne. She  had  at  school  a  Canadian  governess  who 
would  ''  declaim  at  odd  moments,  in  a  voice  throb- 
bing with  a  sense  of  their  beauty,  that  soul-stirring 
lyric  which  begins  :  '  When  the  hounds  of  spring 
are  on  winter's  traces.'  "  The  governess  often  had 
"  Laus  Veneris  "  with  her  when  the  girls  were  play- 
ing tennis,  and  *'  when  it  was  time  to  return  to  the 
house  she  would  cause  me  to  walk  beside  her,  and 
then  I  would  hear  about  *  Anactoria  '  and  the  other 
glorious  pieces  to  be  found  within  the  covers  of  her 
cherished  volume."  Judge,  then,  the  young  girl's 
excitement  when  she  was  first  asked  to  dinner,  found 
Watts   "  waiting  to   receive   me    in   his   charming 

276 


DELICATE  DETAILS 

dining-room  which,  contrary  to  a  published  account, 
is  not  connected  by  folding  doors  with  the  adjoining 
room,"  and  was  taken  out  into  the  garden  and  asked 
"  to  partake  of  the  biggest,  fattest  gooseberries  I  had 
ever  seen."  Judge,  again,  her  delight  when  she  met 
Swinburne,  and, 

looking  hard  at  me  out  of  those  wonderful  eyes, 
he  ejaculated  two  or  three  times  the  word  ''Tiens  !  " 

And  imagine  with  what  a  keen  observation,  when 
she  went  to  "  The  Pines  "  as  a  wife,  she  noted  every- 
thing which  was  likely  to  interest  future  students 
of  the  poet's  works. 

It  is  impossible  to  do  more  than  give  an  idea  of 
the  wealth  of  the  material  which  she  now  makes 
available.  Here,  as  she  says,  is  something  "  apropos 
de  bottes."  ''  A  brilliant  essayist  wrote  in  a  leading 
review  "  that  Swinburne  had  small  hands  and  feet. 
He  had  not  : 

I  had  ample  opportunity  for  knowing  a  good 
deal  about  the  footwear  of  the  Housemates.  The 
same  boot-maker  made  for  both  of  them.  There 
was  but  little  difference  in  size,  Swinburne's  feet 
being  a  trifle  larger  than  Walter's.  The  poet  took 
what,  in  the  trade,  is  called  ''  an  eight  and  a  half," 
so  that  to  write  of  his  "  tiny  feet  "  is  absurd. 
Swinburne  had  his  boots  made  of  calf  leather, 
while  Walter  preferred  a  soft  kid.  Often  when  I 
was  out  walking  with  Walter  I  would  notice  that 
he  had  on  a  pair  of  calf  boots.  I  would  say,  "  You've 
got  Swinburne's  boots  on  again.  Oh,  dear  !  Why 
will  you  not  look  ?  " 

277 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

Swinburne  did  not  wear  his  hair  long  ;  **  the  little 
he  possessed  was  often  cut  by  the  barber."  He  had 
a  horror  of  drawing  small  cheques.  *'  Lord  Burn- 
ham  may  be  interested  to  learn  that  Swinburne's 
morning  paper  was  the  Daily  Telegraph''  He  was 
fond  of  Christmas  and  often  bought  presents  for 
his  friends  : 

He  always  seemed  quite  pleased  with  every- 
thing he  had  bought,  yet  he  appeared  uncertain 
as  to  what  the  recipient  would  think  of  the  little 
gifts.  He  would  inquire  anxiously,  **  Do  you 
think  he  "  (or  "  she,"  as  the  case  might  be)  ''  will 
like  it  ?  "  On  being  reassured  on  this  head,  he 
would  give  a  little  satisfied  sigh,  as  if  the  question 
were  quite  momentous,  and  murmur  with  relief, 
"  Oh,  I'm  so  glad  you  think  so  too  !  " 

It  is  untrue  that  he  was  always  moving  his  arms  and 
legs  about.  *'  He  made,"  says  Mrs.  Watts- Dunton, 
"  no  convulsive  movement  in  the  intimacy  of  our 
domestic  circle,"  and  it  can  only  be  presumed  that 
"  the  strangers  who  took  note  of  his  spasmodic 
movements  .  .  .  were  themselves  the  cause  of  the 
*  symptom  '  they  deplored."  Swinburne  swore  when 
annoyed,  and  *'  I  fear  it  may  come  as  a  shock  to  the 
esthetic  devotees  of  Swinburne  to  learn  that  the 
hideous  word, '  bloke,'  was  not  foreign  to  his  vocabu- 
lary. Coming  from  him  it  sounded  dreadful." 

**  Here  in  this  room,"  says  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton, 
recollections  drive  on  me  in  waves  ;  my  memory 
is  suddenly  like  a  stream  in  spate.  And  the  diffi- 
culty with  me  is  what  to  select  as  memorable  and 
what  to  reject  as  trivial." 

278 


DELICATE  DETAILS 

Her  gift  of  selection  proves  to  be  almost  infallible, 
and  she  leaves  our  knowledge  of  Swinburne's  char- 
acter, habits,  and  tastes  considerably  extended. 
There  are,  however,  some  things  which  remain  to 
be  cleared  up  ;  there  are  a  few  bewildering  problems 
which  still  call  for  solution  if  we  are  to  have  that 
complete  biographical  insight  w^hich  is  necessary 
to  a  full  understanding  of  *'Atalanta"  and  "Tris- 
tram of  Lyonesse."  The  size  of  Swinburne's  feet 
is  now  ascertained  once  and  for  all,  and  it  will  be 
impossible  for  any  future  critic,  however  revolu- 
tionary, to  reopen  the  question  of  the  kind  of  soap 
which  he  used  in  his  bath.  Much  is  established  ; 
but  much  remains  to  be  established.  "  The  Art  of 
biography,"  a  poet  has  written. 

Is  different  from  geography  ; 
Geography  is  about  Maps, 
But  Biography  is  about  Chaps. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  impossible  not  to  see  a  resem- 
blance between  the  progress  of  the  two  arts  :  not 
to  think,  when  such  works  as  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton's 
are  pubHshed,  of  the  piecemeal  amphfication  of 
knowledge  through  the  local  surveys  of  successive 
explorers  :  not  to  visualise  the  life  of  a  great  dead 
man  as  a  continent  which  is  gradually  surveyed.  In 
the  map  of  Swinburne  there  are  still  several  blank 
spaces  which  remain  to  be  filled  up.  His  biographers 
have  thus  far  been  completely  silent  about  certain 
aspects  of  his  diet.  We  know  from  Mrs.  Watts- 
Dunton  the  development  of  his  tastes  in  drinks, 
the  sort  of  tumbler  he  fancied,  the  pleasure  he  took 

279 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

in  partridge-pie,  and  his  attitude  towards  shell- 
fish. This  last  is  illustrated  in  a  passage  so  full  and 
final  that  I  feel  compelled  to  quote  it  : 

Here,  as  illustrating  a  self-control  with  which 
he  is  seldom  credited,  I  record  his  avoidance  of 
those  dishes  which  he  knew  from  experience 
were  not  good  for  him.  For  instance,  he  avoided 
shell-fish,  although  he  hked  it.  Lobster  or  crab 
was  never  served.  I  remember  once  buying  some 
aspic  jelly  which  I  made  into  moulds  with  very 
pink  shrimps  showing  through  the  gelatinous 
transparency.  He  was  immensely  pleased  with 
the  appearance  of  the  dainty.  ''  How  very  pretty 
those  little  things  look — almost  too  pretty  to 
eat  !  "  was  his  comment.  *'  But  I  think  I  must 
this  time  because  you  prepared  it." 

It  is  a  heartening  episode  ;  our  mediaeval  ancestors 
would  have  made  of  it  a  Morality  Play  in  which  the 
issue  should  lie  between  four  characters,  Courtesy 
and  Dyspepsia  on  the  one  side  and  Churlishness 
and  Good  Digestion  on  the  other,  the  conflict  be- 
tween Appetite  and  Medical  Advice  being  the  theme 
for  a  subsidiary  plot.  Lobster  was  banished  from 
Swinburne's  Ufe,  shrimps  admitted  only  occasion- 
ally, and  with  a  gallant  gesture  ;  but  what  of  early 
morning  tea  ?  It  is  a  fairly  full  account  of  Swin- 
burne's normal  day  that  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton  gives 
us,  but,  following  for  once  the  usual  custom  of 
biographers  in  omitting  the  things  which  interest 
us  most,  she  is  silent  regarding  the  very  beginning 
of  his  mornings.  Did  he  or  did  he  not  take  tea  in 
bed  ?  If  he  did  was  it  his  habit  to  take  it  (a)  alone, 

280 


DELICATE  DETAILS 

(b)  ^^ith  bread  and  butter,  or  (c)  with  biscuits  ?  With 
regard  to  clothes,  again,  there  are  important  points 
to  be  cleared  up.  He  invariably,  we  now  know,  wore 
soft  collars  and  shirts,  and  liked  them  clean  ;  he 
refused  to  be  measured  for  his  clothes  ;  and  his 
boots  were  of  calf  and  of  an  eight-and-a-half  size. 

But  there  is  a  question  still  outstanding.  Some 
people  might  hesitate  to  ask  it,  even  in  an  age  when 
we  have  grown  accustomed  to  the  most  brutal  frank- 
ness about  the  most  intimate  and  sacred  details  of 
private  life.  But  I  find  it  impossible  not  to  express 
my  curiosity  about  it  :  Did  Swinburne  wear  sock 
suspenders  ?  So  very  much  hangs  upon  them.  We 
have  already  certain  data  which  would  give  future 
critics  a  basis  for  speculation,  even  were  no  further 
information  forthcoming  from  authoritative  sources. 
But  the  data  conflict,  and  if  no  more  are  supplied  the 
Problem  is  hkely  to  be  as  endlessly  fruitful  of  con- 
troversy as  is  that  of  the  identity  of  Shakespeare's 
**  Mr.  W.  H."  On  the  one  hand  Swinburne's  passion 
for  neatness,  and  especially  sartorial  neatness,  is 
clear.  But  on  the  other  hand  we  have  his  equally 
evident  inability  to  understand  or  employ  the  com- 
plex mechanical  devices  of  this  inventive  age.  He 
was  amazed  at  the  marvels  of  photography.  The 
thought  of  teaching  him  to  use  a  typewriter  was  no 
sooner  entertained  than  abandoned.  He  was  de- 
Hghted  with  a  present  of  an  eighteen-penny  napkin- 
ring,  for  "I  doubt  if  Swinburne  had  ever  heard  of 
celluloid."  Further  : 

His  intelligence  was  so  confined  to  pretty  and 
imaginative  literature  that  even  the  mechanism 

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BOOKS  REVIEWED 

of  a  soda-water  syphon  was  beyond  him.  When 
for  the  first  time  I  manipulated  one  in  his  presence, 
he  gazed  at  me,  evincing  considerable  apprehen- 
sion for  my  safety.  I  succeeded  in  releasing  a  gentle 
stream  into  my  glass.  When  I  stopped ,  he  said  with 
an  accent  of  admiration  and  surprise, "  How  cleverly 
you  did  that ;  I  couldn't  have  done  it."  I  could  dis- 
claim the  compliment,  but  I  could  not  truthfully 
contradict  the  second  part  of  his  comment. 

On  the  whole,  in  the  light  of  this,  I  incline  to 
think  that  Swinburne's  socks  must  have  been  left  to 
struggle  with  the  force  of  gravity  unassisted  by 
mechanical  aids  ;  but  if  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton  can 
clear  the  matter  up  in  a  supplement  to  this  book, 
all  lovers  of  literature  will  be  grateful.  And  another 
point  is  :  did  none  of  his  modernistic  friends  intro- 
duce him  to  the  mystery  of  bath  salts  ?  "  Next  to 
love  of  his  friends  came  Swinburne's  love  of  the  sea. 
And  next  to  his  love  of  the  sea  ranked  his  love  of 
babies."  His  friends  and  babies  he  could  see  at 
Putney  ;  but  Putney  has  no  more  sea-coast  than 
Bohemia.  Salt  and  ozone  being  essential,  Swinburne 
was  happy  in  discovering  a  brand  of  soap  called 
Samphire  Soap  : 

This  precious  tablet  smelt  of  the  sea,  or  was 
supposed  to  smell  of  the  sea.  A.  C.  S.  believed 
implicitly  that  it  was  highly  charged  with  the 
active  principle  of  ozone.  He  sensed  the  wave  in 
its  odour,  and  the  suds  in  his  bath  were  refresh- 
ing to  him  as  the  foam  of  the  ocean.  Needless  to 
say,  "  Samphire  "  soap  was  a  thing  of  which  we 
never  permitted  ourselves  to  ''  run  short." 

282 


DELICATE  DETAILS 

*'  I  still,"  adds  Mrs.  Watts -Dunton,  "  keep  a  cake 
of  it  as  a  souvenir  of  the  happiest  time  of  my  life." 
The  time  is  probably  not  far  off  when  it  will  be 
generally  felt  that  so  precious  a  relic  as  a  cake  of 
Swinburne's  Soap  ought  not  to  remain  indefinitely 
in  private  hands.  But  there  a  larger  question  is 
opened  up.  Is  it  not  time  that  steps  should  be  taken 
to  ensure  the  future  of  "  The  Pines  "  ?  Ought  not 
a  Swinburne  Memorial  Committee  to  be  estab- 
lished with  a  view  of  acquiring  it,  if  and  when  it 
comes  into  the  market,  as  a  permanent  home  for 
the  soap,  and  other  relics  ?  These  are  difficult  times, 
and  people  have  little  money  to  spare  ;  but  surely 
we  have  here  an  exceptional  case. 

I  cannot  conclude  this  all  too  summary  review  of 
a  fascinating  volume  without  a  wish  that  other  great 
poets  had  been  so  fortunate  in  their  biographers  as 
Swinburne  has  been  in  Mrs.  Watts-Dunton.  How 
little  we  know  of  the  Home  Life  of  Shelley  ;  how 
greatly  a  Mrs.  Joseph  Severin  might  have  supple- 
mented our  knowledge  of  Keats  !  Years  after  Keats 's 
death  Browning  passionately  asked  "  What  porridge 
had  John  Keats  ?  "  He  got  no  answer  ;  his  legiti- 
mate curiosity  was  unsatisfied.  Keats  almost  cer- 
tainly ate  porridge  ;  there  must  have  been  people 
who  knew  what  kind  of  porridge.  But  they  cared 
nothing  for  the  needs  of  posterity  ;  they  selfishly 
kept  their  knowledge  to  themselves.  All  we  can  do 
is  to  be  thankful  that  we  have  now^  a  full-length 
portrait  of  at  least  one  of  the  great  poets  :  pending 
anything  further,  we  shall  have  to  take  him  as  a  type 
of  them  all. 


283 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

CHRISTOPHER  SMART,  author  of  the 
Song  to  David,  was  born  at  Shipbourne, 
Kent,  on  April  4,  1722.  His  family  was  North 
Country  ;  his  father  was  steward  in  Kent  to  William, 
Lord  Vane,  younger  son  of  Lord  Barnard  of  Raby 
Castle,  Durham.  The  poet  was  sent  to  school  at 
Durham.  His  holidays  were  frequently  spent  at 
Raby  Castle.  His  talents  were  noticed,  and  the  con- 
nection resulted  in  his  getting  an  allowance  first 
from  the  Duchess  of  Cleveland,  and  then  from 
Henry  Vane,  Earl  of  Darlington.  In  1739  he  was 
sent  to  Pembroke  College,  Cambridge,  where  he 
was  contemporary  with  Gray.  Gray  was  sober  and 
fastidious.  Smart  something  of  a  rioter  and  drunk- 
ard ;  they  did  not  become  intimate,  though  Gray, 
when  Smart  was  in  distress,  took  pains  to  do  him 
kindnesses.  The  turbulent  undergraduate  became 
in  1745  a  dissipated  Fellow.  Perhaps  it  was  merely 
that  he  chafed  against  surroundings  where  (in  his 
words) 

discipline  and  dulness  dwell 
And  genius  ne'er  was  seen  to  roam. 

No  sooner  was  he  a  Fellow  than  he  scandalised  the 
precise  by  making  the  undergraduates  perform  a 
comedy  of  his  own  composition,  *'  A  Trip  to  Cam- 
bridge," in  the  College  Hall.  In  1747  Gray  writes  : 

His   debts   daily  increase.  ...  In  the  mean- 
time he  is  amusing  himself  with  a  comedy  of  his 

284 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

own  writing,  which  he  makes  all  the  boys  of  his 
acquaintance  act.  .  .  .  Our  friend,  Lawman,  the 
mad  attorney,  is  his  copyist,  and  truly  the  author 
himself  is  as  mad  as  he.  His  piece,  he  says,  is  in- 
imitable— true  sterling  wit  and  humour,  by  God, 
and  he  can't  hear  the  prologue  without  being 
ready  to  die  with  laughter.  He  acts  five  parts  him- 
self, and  is  sorry  he  can't  do  all  the  rest.  He  has 
also  advertised  a  collection  of  odes,  and  for  his 
vanity  and  faculty  of  lying,  they  are  come  to  their 
full  maturity.  All  this,  you  see,  must  come  to  a 
jail  or  Bedlam,  and  that  without  help,  almost 
without  pity. 

The  jail  was  narrowly  escaped  almost  at  once  ; 
Smart  w^as  arrested  for  a  tailor's  debt,  and  his 
colleagues  (w^ho,  Hke  Gray,  could  not,  it  seems, 
help  taking  an  interest  in  him)  saved  him  by  a  sub- 
scription. In  1750  he  w^on  the  Seatonian  Prize  for  a 
poem  (the  Prize  still  exists  and  is  substantial)  on  the 
Attributes  of  the  Supreme  Being.  In  1751  Gray's 
prediction  came  literally  true.  Gray  is  supposed  to 
be  referring  to  Smart  in  a  letter  to  Walpole,  who 
wanted  an  amanuensis  :  *'  We  have  a  Man  here 
that  writes  a  good  Hand  ;  but  he  has  two  little  Fail- 
ings, that  hinder  my  recommending  him  to  you.  He 
is  lousy,  and  he  is  mad  :  he  sets  out  this  week  for 
Bedlam  ;  but  if  you  insist  upon  it,  I  don't  doubt  he 
will  pay  his  Respects  to  you."  At  all  events  to  Bedlam 
Smart  went,  with  religious  mania.  He  was  let  out 
and  at  once — showing  therein  a  prudence  rare  in 
the  lives  of  most  authors  and  unique  in  his  own 
— married    the    daughter    of    a    publisher.     This, 

285 


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ordinarily,  would  have  been  enough  to  lose  him  his 
Fellowship  ;  but  Pembroke,  lenient  to  him  once 
more,  told  him  he  could  keep  it  if  he  would  go  on 
writing  Seatonian  Poems.  This  he  did,  winning  the 
prize  in  1751,  1752,  1753,  and  1755  ;  but  by  that 
time  he  had  gone  to  London  and  begun  to  write 
for  the  booksellers.  He  used  the  striking  pseudonym 
of  ''  Mary  Midnight,"  and  he  edited  a  periodical 
(of  which  I  should  hke  to  see  a  set)  called  "  The 
Midwife,  or  the  Old  Woman's  Magazine."  For  ten 
years  he  led  a  miserable  life,  deep  in  drink  and  debt. 
His  family  left  him,  and,  developing  mania  again, 
he  was  sent  back  to  the  madhouse,  where  he  spent 
two  years.  Johnson,  who  had  always  liked  him,  went 
to  see  him  there.  He  thought  that  Smart  was  per- 
haps best  off  there,  as  he  dug  in  the  garden,  whereas, 
before  his  confinement,  all  the  exercise  he  got  was  a 
walk  to  the  alehouse,  *'  but  he  was  carried  back 
again."  Nevertheless,  Johnson  did  not  think  him 
mad  enough  to  be  in  an  asylum.  **  His  infirmities 
were  not  noxious  to  society.  He  insisted  upon  people 
praying  with  him,  and  I'd  as  lief  pray  with  Kit  Smart 
as  with  anyone  else."  During  that  confinement  he 
wrote  the  poem  by  which  his  name  lives,  a  sudden 
burst  into  grandeur,  the  "  Song  to  David,"  noblest 
perhaps  of  all  English  religious  poems.  They  say  he 
wrote  it  with  a  key  on  his  door  panels,  pens  and  ink 
being  denied  him  ;  the  story  is  without  proof.  There 
it  is.  Smart  came  out  ;  resumed  his  former  occu- 
pations ;  met  the  Burneys  and  borrowed  money 
from  them  ;  struck  Fanny  as  having  "  great  wild- 
ness  in  his  manners,  looks,  and  voice,"  and  in  1770 
died  in  the  King's  Bench  Prison. 

286 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

Smart's  poems,  except  for  one,  have  not  I  think 
been  edited  for  over  a  century.  There  is  no  doubt 
at  all  that  "  The  Song  to  David  "  was  immeasurably 
the  best  of  them,  and  that  it  had  a  quality  found  in 
nothing  else  of  its  age.  So  out  of  its  surroundings 
was  it  that  even  those  of  Smart's  contemporaries 
who  admired  his  other  work  thought  nothing  of  it. 
Dr.  Johnson  is  not  a  case  in  point.  He  wrote  a  ludic- 
rous parody  of  the  "  Song  to  David,"  catching  the 
form  and  missing — but  perhaps  he  wanted  to  miss — 
its  blazing  content  ;  but  he  thought  nothing  of 
Smart  even  when  Smart  was  sane.  It  was  when  asked 
his  view  of  the  respective  merits  of  Smart  and  Derrick 
that  he  made  his  celebrated  remark  (which  might 
so  often  be  justly  applied  to  other  controversies 
concerning  authors),  *'  Sir,  there  is  no  settUng  the 
point  of  precedency  between  a  louse  and  a  flea." 
But  in  1 79 1  Smart  was  edited  in  two  volumes  by 
an  admirer,  and  from  that  edition  the  "  Song  to 
David  "  was  omitted  as  the  unfortunate  lapse  of  a 
lunatic.  It  afforded,  remarked  the  editor,  *'  melan- 
choly proofs  of  the  recent  estrangement  of  his  mind." 
Just  afterwards  Anderson,  compiling  his  "  British 
Poets,"  came  across  six  stanzas.  He  could  not  find  a 
whole  copy  of  the  poem,  and  printed  these  six,  re- 
marking that  "  the  slight  defects  and  singularities 
of  this  neglected  performance  are  amply  compen- 
sated by  a  grandeur,  a  majesty  of  thought,  and  a 
happiness  of  expression."  Chalmers  reprinted  the 
six  stanzas  and  ^poke  of  their  *'  majestic  animation"; 
and  in  1819  the  whole  poem  was  reprinted  by  an 
anonymous  admirer.  Fifty  years  passed  before  it 
really  came  into  its  own  ;  but  then  its  great  qualities 

287 


BOOKS  REVIEWED 

were  fully  realised.  Rossetti  wrote  of  it  as  "  the  only 
great  accomplished  poem  of  the  last  century.  The 
unaccomplished  ones  are  Chatterton's — of  course, 
I  mean  earlier  than  Blake  or  Coleridge,  and  without 
reckoning  so  exceptional  a  genius  as  Burns.  A  master- 
piece of  rich  imagery,  exhaustive  resources,  and 
reverberant  sound."  Browning  made  Smart  one  of 
the  recipients  of  his  ''  Parleyings  with  Certain  People 
of  Importance  in  their  Day."  He  described  him- 
self, exploring  Smart's  works  (and,  by  implication, 
the  eighteenth  century),  as  one  who  goes  through 
room  after  room  in  a  great  house  where  there  is  no 
lack  of  the  signs  of  decent  taste  and  adequate  cul- 
ture, where 

All  showed  the  Golden  Mean  without  a  hint 
Of  brave  extravagance  that  breaks  the  rule, 

and  who  suddenly  lifts  a  hanging  and  steps  into  a 
magnificently  beautiful  chapel,  full  of  a  profusion 
of  audacious  beauties.  So  with  Smart  : 

The  man  was  sound 
And  sane  at  starting  :   all  at  once  the  ground 
Gave  way  beneath  his  step,  a  certain  smoke 
Curled  up  and  caught  him,  or  perhaps  down  broke 
A  fireball  wrapping  flesh  and  spirit  both 
In  conflagration. 

Critics  usually  exaggerate  ;  it  is  a  pity  to  under-rate 
Gray's  '*  Elegy  "  because  it  is  not  in  the  same  kind 
as  the  ''  Song  to  David  "  and  the  writings  of  Blake  ; 
even  common  sense  and  common  tenderness  have 
achieved  their  milder  glories.   Still  Smart's  poem 

288 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

does  sweep  one  away  as  nothing  else  does  that  was 
written  in  its  age,  an  age  which  employed  the  word 
"  enthusiast  "  as  a  synonym  for  "  maniac."  Smart, 
in  his  cell,  burning  with  a  fierce  fire  of  inspiration, 
rhapsodised  like  ''  the  lunatic,  the  lover,  and  the 
poet  "  all  in  one.  He  saw  the  whole  universe  blazing 
with  light  and  pulsing  with  adoration,  and  the  very 
incoherence  and  inconsequence  of  his  vivid  apos- 
trophes witness  the  intensity  of  his  visionary  frenzy. 
From  a  quiet  beginning,  contemplating  the  qualities 
of  the  ideal  man,  he  rises,  with  quicker  pulse,  to  a 
survey  of  the  riches  of  God's  earth,  birds,  beasts, 
and  fishes,  trees,  flowers,  and  gems,  until  he  breaks 
into  the  superbest  hymn  of  praise  in  our  language  : 

For  Adoration,  in  the  skies. 
The  Lord's  philosopher  espies 

The  Dog,  the  Ram,  and  Rose  ; 
The  planet's  ring,  Orion's  sword  ; 
Nor  is  his  greatness  less  ador'd 

In  the  vile  worm  that  glows. 

So  he  goes  through  a  splendid  catalogue.  Then, 
with  the  repetitiveness  of  religious  excitement,  he 
utters  stanza  after  stanza  springing  from  certain 
epithets  : 

Sweet  is  the  dew  that  falls  betimes 
And  drops  upon  the  leafy  limes  ; 

Sweet  Hermon's  fragrant  air  : 
Sweet  is  the  hly's  silver  bell, 
And  sweet  the  wakeful  tapers  smell 

That  watch  for  early  prayer.  .  .   . 

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Sweeter  in  all  the  strains  of  love, 
The  language  of  thy  turtle-dove, 

Pair'd  to  thy  swelHng  chord  ; 
Sweeter  with  ev'ry  grace  endued, 
The  glory  of  thy  gratitude, 

Respir'd  unto  the  Lord. 

Strong  is  the  horse  upon  his  speed  ; 
Strong  in  pursuit  the  rapid  glede. 

Which  makes  at  once  his  game  ; 
Strong  the  tall  ostrich  on  the  ground  ; 
Strong  through  the  turbulent  profound 

Shoots  Xiphias  to  his  aim. 

Strong  is  the  lion — like  a  coal 
His  eyeball — like  a  bastion's  mole 

His  chest  against  the  foes  : 
Strong  the  gier  eagle  on  his  sail, 
Strong  against  tide  th'  enormous  whale 

Emerges,  as  he  goes. 

But  stronger  still  in  earth  and  air, 
And  in  the  sea,  the  man  of  prayer, 

And  far  beneath  the  tide. 
And  in  the  seat  to  faith  assigned. 
Where  ask  is  have,  where  seek  is  find, 

Where  knock  is  open  wide.  .  .  . 

Shouting  in  exultation,  he  proceeds  through  stanza 
after  stanza  on  this  model  until,  with  the  *'  glorious" 
stanzas  he  reaches  the  most  splendid  peroration  in 
English,  concluding  with  the  culminating  act  of 
salvation  now  at  last 

290 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

Determin'd,  Dar'd,  and  Done. 

What  emphasis  in  the  very  sound  of  it  !  Smart 
never  did  compose  anything  Hke  that  before  or  after; 
had  this  been  his  usual  level  he  would  have  been 
one  of  the  greatest  of  the  world's  poets.  Yet  critics 
have  been  rather  unjust  to  his  other  work.  Mr.  Birrell 
is  typical  when  he  describes  Smart  as  being  **  until 
he  lost  his  reason  a  very  indifferent  versifier."  Mr. 
Streatfield  goes  farther  and  remarks  that  *'  his  poems 
— all  save  one — were  the  spiritless  effusions  of  a 
literary  hack."  Some  of  them  were  ;  but  not  all, 
unless  the  opinion  be  held  that  there  can  be  no 
degrees  of  merit  in  anything  so  uniformly  con- 
temptible as  eighteenth-century  verse.  Let  it  be 
admitted  that  most  of  Smart's  poetry  was  written 
under  constraint  of  an  atmosphere  which  did  not 
favour  the  more  ardent  kind  of  poetry,  and  that  he 
might  have  done  much  more  had  he  been  born  in 
another  century.  But  even  his  more  conventional 
verses  are  not  devoid  of  poetic  feehng  or  craftsman- 
ship. His  poem  "  On  an  Eagle  Confined  in  a  College 
Court  "  is  worth  a  place  in  any  anthology,  energetic, 
eloquent,  and  precise.  In  the  Odes,  which  Gray 
anticipated  with  so  much  disquiet,  there  are  stilted 
things  and  passages  which  have  been  spoiled  for  us 
by  the  change  in  idiom — for  instance,  the  salute  to 
a  bride  as  "  egregious  nymph  !  "  Modern  taste,  too, 
might  reject  such  works  as  the  '*  Ode  on  the  Sudden 
Death  of  a  Clergyman."  But  nothing  could  be  more 
delicate,  in  the  manner  of  the  time,  than  the  ''  Ode 
to  Idleness,"  which  begins  : 


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Gk>ddess  of  ease,  leave  Lethe's  brink, 
Obsequious  to  the  Muse  and  me  ; 

For  once  endure  the  pain  to  think. 
Oh  !  sweet  insensibiUty  ! 

Sister  of  peace  and  indolence, 

Bring,  Muse  1  bring  numbers  soft  and  slow, 
Elaborately  void  of  sense. 

And  sweetly  thoughtless  let  them  flow.  .  .  . 

The  last  two  verses  run  : 

For  thee,  O  Idleness,  the  woes 

Of  life  we  patiently  endure. 
Thou  art  the  source  whence  labour  flows, 

We  shun  thee  but  to  make  thee  sure. 

For  who'd  sustain  war's  toil  and  waste, 
Or  who  th'  hoarse  thund'ring  of  the  sea. 

But  to  be  idle  at  the  last. 
And  find  a  pleasing  end  in  thee  ? 

There  is  not  only  truth  but  humour  in  these  pointed 
lines.  Humour  may  be  found  elsewhere — in  Smart's 
satirical  work,  in  some  of  his  charming  ballads,  in 
the  **  Apology  to  a  Lady  for  his  being  a  Little  Man." 
It  is  sometimes  found  misplaced.  He  had  the  effron- 
tery to  write  an  Epilogue  to  "  Othello,"  to  be  spoken 
by  Desdemona,  which  opens  with  : 

True  woman  to  the  last — my  peroration 
I  come  to  speak  in  spight  of  suffocation  ; 
To  show  the  present  and  the  age  to  come, 
We  may  be  choak'd,  but  never  can  be  dumb. 

292 


CHRISTOPHER  SMART 

His  ''  Georgic,"  ''  The  Hop-Garden,"  a  eulogy  of 
the  best  product  of  his  native  Kent,  is  an  amusing 
burlesque  in  the  Miltonic  style.  His  invocation  will 
give  a  notion  of  how  close  he  gets  to  his  model.  He 
implores  the  help  of  John  PhiHps,  who  had  pre- 
viously copied  Milton  : 

If  thou,  O  PhiHps,  fav'ring  dost  not  hear 
Me,  inexpert  of  verse  ;  with  gentle  hand 
Uprear  the  unpinion'd  muse,  high  on  the  top 
Of  that  immeasurable  mount,  that  far 
Exceeds  thine  own  Plynlimmon,  where  thou  tun'st 
With  Phoebus'  self  thy  lyre.  Give  me  to  turn 
Th'  unwieldy  subject  with  thy  graceful  ease, 
Extol  its  baseness  with  thy  art  ;    but  chief 
Illumine,  and  invigorate  with  thy  fire. 

Elsewhere  in  the  poem  a  close  and  sympathetic 
observation  of  nature  is  shown  ;  as  it  is  also  in  "  A 
Morning  Piece,"  ''  A  Noon  Piece,"  and  "  A  Night 
Piece."  These  three  poems  do  not  resemble  the 
"  Song  to  David,"  but  they  are  very  charming. 
Smart  mad  was  a  great  poet  ;  even  sane  he  must 
have  been  a  remarkably  good  companion  in  those 
taverns. 


293 


--y^rasiTY  OP  OAT 


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